How to impress in training contract interviews

[Music] you Oh Graham can you tell me why you would like to come and work at an international city door phone yeah absolutely something that is probably three reasons for services you know obviously read that the firm has a lot of international offices particularly in Asia and Europe and so I'm really interested in working abroad in the future something I'd be really excited I think of second reason really interested in in business as you know I'm studying economics and law I'm really interested in understanding the economy and different industries and how different businesses work and so I think would be really exciting to work a company that that does transactions and that buys and sells them so gradually you know interesting and then the third reason is you know I'm a very competitive and a high-performing person and I think that it would be you know really exciting to work in our in a full-on and intense environment this was a bad answer um unfortunately there were aspects of it that we do hear an interview for somebody who works in an international legal environment the last thing you want to hear is that somebody wants to come and work with you so they can work abroad that answer fails to recognize what is the real international element of our work which is the multi jurisdictional aspect the other weakness in this answer was that whilst Graham plainly has commercial awareness he didn't give me any insight as to why he wants to work in a legal environment as opposed to some other form of commercial or financial environment so Ally um can you tell me a bit about why you'd like to work at an international fifty law firm why that career appeals to you yes well I think that I it was after I attended a negotiation workshop at my university college and it was a combination of having very intellectually stimulating case study so we were dealing with energy clients there were multi-jurisdictional legal issues which was challenging to get my head around not only because I'm an on law student but I think I enjoyed that aspect of it and then we were separated into teams and we had to think of a strategy to be used at an alternative dispute resolution session and I enjoyed working together and thinking how we could best prevent our clients case and I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to practice my advocacy skills by then negotiating against the other side so the combination of teamwork but also very intellectually challenging work is what attracted me to working in an international City law firm I thought this was a good answer she immediately sold herself to me as a strong candidate she had plainly prepared the type of answer she was going to give but I think that's fine we want candidates who's prepared and what I particularly liked about her answer was that she had thought about her impersonal experience doing something law related and then articulated very clearly what she liked about it and how it played to her strengths what is it about your own personal characteristics do you think that would make you well-suited to this career what is your particular strengths there are two things and firstly I often receive feedback from academic teachers or students I work with as part of my extracurricular activities that I'm around Susie astok team member and so I think this is important to bring to a team because it galvanizes other team members and also brings energy and motivation when dealing with particularly challenging tasks but I also think it means that I'm motivated when I have to work by myself and secondly I enjoy problem solving and I think that particularly working in an international City law firm the emphasis on finding a reasonable commercial solution is obviously very important and I enjoy applying my mind in this way with this type of question we're really looking for two things one is some degree of personal insights and self-awareness and the other thing we're looking for is an understanding of how you would work in a professional environment what skills you have that would make you suited for a particular job and I thought Ally answered this on both fronts really quite well she talked about her own characteristics and showed insight into herself but she'd also thought about how she would demonstrate those in a professional environment James what skills do you have that you think would make you well suited to being a city solicitor I think are two key skills which make me well suited to a career as a commercial solicitor so that's difficult strong analytical skills which have been developed in part through studying economic and financial history for example I've learned to analyze the factual narrative and pick out the salient facts from it and construct a persuasive argument from it secondly I think I've got strong practical commercial skills so for example at university I was a bit wary of my student newspaper and I was just having editorial board and historically the newspaper had been lost making and it was funded in part through a grant from Students Union in part through the grant from the university itself but also for advertising revenue and in the aftermath the global financial crisis advertising revenue dipped I became aware of this and I sat down with a colleague to think you know what could we do sir to attract where advertisers into bringing more money for the paper and to try and expand it and develop our offering and so we sat down we thought what do we have that we can sell what do people win to pay for and so firstly there was a free paper at a very wide circulation throughout the university was well read and so it gave advertisers access to highly educated and motivated students between the ages of 19 and 25 which was something of value and secondly it also gave companies who wanted to attract bright graduates into their companies the opportunity to target these these graduates so what we did is we we use LinkedIn to identify University alumni at various target companies and approached them and asked if they would want to advertise in our newspaper we also offer the more bespoke service so we gave companies the opportunity to sponsor articles and we provided links at the bottom of the articles to their graduate recruitment web pages and often I think at university people often turn to Korea's fares and they think I was a great idea applying for this work for this company they go here and this gets about it but actually we're able to present to a companies a really compelling offering of having a link at the bottom of a newspaper article which means that students who would otherwise forget about the opportunity instead was the opportunity to submit applications there and then James had plainly prepared for answering this type of question I also thought he answered it very well in terms of having thought about both his academic ability for the job and identifying what it is about his studies that would place him well for law and I thought he got that spot-on he also introduced some real commercial awareness which again is very important where he probably let himself down a bit though was by going on with his example for a bit too long and perhaps in a bit too much detail if you had to identify one character weakness about yourself what would it be suppose one character weakness I have it that I get get bored quite easily so for example at university we have lots of lectures on history and some of them are modules which you didn't necessarily choose or the lecture isn't interesting and making goals very long and the lecturer is often quite monotonal and don't deliver it in a particularly interactive way and so in seminars University if somebody is presenting on a topic and it's obvious they haven't done their homework all day you know they've been out the night before then you know it can be quite easy to turn off from that I suppose that's a week if I have another weakness is I have a tendency to be quite late things which is something I suppose I've had out sometimes of trials much you know I've tried to address it from five prime and sometimes it gets better but I suppose for that's also a weakness this was not a strong answer from James I don't think that he had prepared for the question I also don't think that he on the spot thought about either what we were looking for or how his answer come across so he failed to demonstrate real personal insight and he also gave me two examples of attributes that would make me quite concerned as an employer and didn't demonstrate enough awareness as to how he might remedy those characteristics tell me about how you would appraise a character weakness that you think you have I think I'm a very energetic and enthusiastic person you know I like to take on a lot of work and throw myself into to new challenges and so I think the weakness there is that sometimes like to take on too much work or I can to launch into an activity without necessarily thinking about it business the best way and so an example would be taking over politics course at university and I had a research essay to do you know I got the topic and I was really interested and I thought ok I'll launch into it you know I spent most of the weekend researching the question and then sort of later in the week when I look back what I've done I sort of realized that you know just by my enthusiasm and really nailed it and followed my active in wasted and so the night sort of made me realize that you know sometimes by rushing in because I'm enthusiastic it might not necessarily be the best use of my time or energy and so it's something I'm conscious of having to manage and think about whenever I'm thinking about doing something this is an acceptable answer it's always a bit worrying when a candidate starts talking about taking too much on and not necessarily being focused in how he approaches tasks but I think the way that Graham rescued this answer was by placing that weakness in the context of a strength so he both in his presentation and also in his content he really sold himself to me as being enthusiastic and keen to get involved and take on matters and interests and he placed his weakness in terms of taking on too much quite nicely in the context of that strength and he also demonstrated some self-awareness that he's able to articulate that weakness and by reference to an actual example do you think you're a robust person absolutely and I think that through my experiences of making the jump from school to university as many people do but also by managing the multiple demands on my time that I have at the moment through being on the events committee at my university college also being a member of the German literary interest group and also managing personal demands all alongside my academic career I think that I have developed resilience but it's on them we're very aware of and I think that going into a challenging profession such as law this will be something I'll need to continue thinking about consciously so for example if I'm given many tasks as a trainee solicitor I think that I'll need to be robust in managing my own capacity say and knowing when to say no and knowing when it might be difficult for me to achieve a task in accordance with a certain person's demands so developing the confidence to be honest about that is something that I'm aware will be important once I'm a trainee solicitor when we ask questions about whether somebody is robust or how they deal with pressure we're looking for both an example we like personal examples but I also am looking for the candidate to articulate how they react at almost an emotional level and Ally's answer whilst telling me that she does a lot of things and that she had a lot of interest which is important didn't really respond on the emotional insight and I felt that was lacking in this answer do you think you're a natural leader or are you more of a follower I think it's difficult to put yourself firmly follower or the leader camp I definitely should think that when I have to show leadership skills that I've United demonstrated examples for example at school I was Captain of my of my school rugby team but having said that I've misplaced a number of team sports playing football for example in rugby but one example of leadership where I think that I raised the occasion was on a British exploration slightly trip to what took Norway and it was 40 of us and we were divided into four groups of ten people each called a fire and in my group some people with some quite different backgrounds people different motivations of being there some people are going to be joining the army and other people were there more and so more of a holiday other people wants to manage the physical aspects of the trip and so I was elected leader of my fire and it was my job to try and bond all these disparate people together and try and ensure that in a while nervously they will be Keeks to some extent people have a sort of a sense of shared purpose and a shared goal to rally around and one example of that is when we were sea kayaking and as you can imagine sleek lighting was quite and physically archer security so there was a group or mortgage race out in front and explore the different floors and those accrue to a quite happy because pedaling along with their own speed and sort of like seeing the other half of the group race off into the horizon so that where that was that was to paddle with the slow group of the back and try and engage with conversation and take their mind off the fact that you know we were going to space it was quite physically arduous activity and I also get to leave it to paddle with the advanced group and just try to make sure they can go too far into the into the distance at the start of the day we would would examine imagined and look very well in the way where perhaps he wanted to go and amuse themselves while the other groups called traffic etc so the case of reading sort of 20 plan and try to created a sense of shared purpose this was a thoughtful response from James and I thought it was strong for two reasons firstly he had I think prepared for and given thought to what we as an employer would look for in a leadership skill and under as a team player he also answered the question by reference to a personal experience and in doing that both was able to answer the question with some specificity but also took the opportunity to give me some interesting background and fact about himself which is always interesting we see a lot of students coming through the door for interviews and they can be both law students and also non law students and I think it's important particularly for non law students to understand that what we're looking for in our interview candidates is not just an academic ability and strengths at law because of course not all candidates will have that but proper academic strength and also an ability to apply their learning in a commercial context and I think that can be demonstrated to us in in two or three ways the first is to be able to demonstrate and talk about their real motivation for working in a commercial legal environment and that means I think thinking specifically about what a lawyer or solicitor does as opposed to somebody in another professional business role the second is to think about their own personal strengths and characteristics and also their weaknesses what is it about that candidate as an individual that is selling itself to me such that I want to offer them the role as opposed to somebody else and the third point we want to know about the candidate as a person so the more that they can talk about their own personal experience and how they have behaved in a particular circumstance the stronger the answer [Music]

Channel: Thomson Reuters Legal Europe

Views: 106,952

Keywords: Thomson Reuters, Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Legal, Law, Legal solutions, legal solutions thomson reuters, Thomson Reuters Legal UK, legal solutions uk, training contract interview, training contract law, training contract tips, training contract uk, training contract questions

Id: Pc8_DQ7aoHc

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2017