The phone rings and a voice on the other end asks, “Will you be considering a career move in the future? I have a number of great opportunities that I’d love to discuss with you in more detail.”
The first time you receive this call, it may be as early as several months into the job. Certainly, if you are working at Biglaw in a major market like New York or Chicago or San Francisco, you will have received this call within your first year at work. Most likely, you are wondering to yourself, “Is this person crazy? Why would I be leaving my job having just arrived?” Then the paranoia creeps in, and an insidious thought crosses your mind. Is this a set-up? Did my law firm hire someone to probe my loyalty to the firm?
Inevitably, the first few times you receive the call, you say politely, “Thanks, but I’m very happy at my firm. I’m not interested in making a move.” You do this with the assurance that, even if the person at the other end of the line is a plant, you’ve said all the right things.
But as the years go by and the glow from your summer associate experience has long worn off, you start to wonder. Is the grass greener elsewhere? Are there other opportunities out there? You also realize that, after the tenth call, headhunters are a dime a dozen and they are calling everyone. All your fellow associates have been receiving the same call, often from the same people. As you continue to receive calls, at some point you say, “I’m not actively seeking another position, I’m happy where I am, but I’d be happy to hear what you have to say.” It’s a subtle change in response, but it opens the door just a crack. And usually, the headhunter will be happy to push the door open and tell you about all the wonderful opportunities that exist. You do this because you are curious, because some of your fellow associates may have informed you that it’s never a bad thing to learn of other opportunities, and maybe because you start to realize that Biglaw doesn’t expect you to stay forever.
You begin the process of talking to headhunters on a semi-regular basis, hearing about these other Biglaw options but politely declining their request for you to send over a CV and float it around. After all, you still feel loyal to your first firm and have developed relationships there already. But there reaches a point in the careers of the vast majority of most Biglaw associates where a partner has yelled at them one too many times, when they’ve been blamed too often for mistakes that weren’t their fault, when they are simply fed up and exhausted from being treated like . . . well, you get the idea. At such a critical moment of crisis, the phone rings and it’s a headhunter. The person who had been nagging you for the past few years with dogged determination, the person whom you ignored and whose voice mails you didn’t respond to and who you treated like an unwanted spammer is, guess what? now your perceived savior.
With sudden alacrity, you now listen with renewed interest as to how the whole headhunting process works and have a big decision to make: to use a headhunter or not?
We’ll continue this discussion in following posts as we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using a headhunter, how to select a good headhunter, and the headhunter’s view of the world.
