Law firms go social in bid to attract top talent
Lucian Tarnowski and (above) Allen & Overy’s social media page on BraveNewTalent
The social recruiting platform BraveNewTalent is helping legal resourcing teams interact with its future talent via online communities of potential new recruits. It has already built a community of 416 people for the law firm Allen & Overy and it has also signed up Eversheds and Pinsent Masons in recent months.
Chief executive Lucian Tarnowski told Recruiter that early engagement with potential talent is crucial for legal firms to secure the best people. “The most savvy law firms have realised that when a graduate gets an offer of a training contract from three, four or five law firms, one of the things that will shape the decision is whether they’ve had any interaction with that firm,” he said.
“A law firm can have a relationship with a candidate in advance through social media and when the candidate comes to decide they will remember those social interactions that they’ve had.”
BraveNewTalent markets a specific group/s of people and invites them to come to engage with an employer via an online community. It uses the concept of Talent Words, which is an alternative to Google Ad Words for the recruitment sector. Once in the community, an individual builds their profile and connects to the respective potential employer. They are kept up-to-date with all of the company’s social media activity on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube via feeds into the community set up by BraveNewTalent.
“The candidate doesn’t have to subscribe individually to follow each one so it makes their life much easier,” explained Tarnowski. “Some of these communities, such as Allen & Overy’s, are growing exponentially.”
Edward Walker, graduate recruitment manager at Pinsent Masons, said the law firm is always looking for new ways to attract high quality candidates. “Especially as we are finding that more traditional advertising methods no longer have the impact they did in the past,” he said. “BraveNewTalent is helping us identify and engage with these candidates and then bring them altogether in one place.”
As well as providing early access to top talent, Walker anticipates that social recruitment will save the firm time and lower its average cost per hire.
