When you hire, do you wait for a position to open up before seeking someone to fill it? Or do you try to anticipate your practice’s growth needs and keep track of the talent available before you’re forced to juggle an empty spot?
While you can’t anticipate every hiring need, if you’re like most Toronto law firms and legal departments, you’re missing opportunities to strategically anticipate and plan for many of them. Here’s how to switch from a reactive hiring process to a proactive one:
- Know where you want to go. What are the long-term business and professional goals for your organization? Where are you headed? How will you know when you’ve gotten there? When you hire proactively, you can hire people who will take your organization in the direction you want to go – but you cannot choose the right people to build this momentum until you know where you’re headed.
- Clarify who you’re looking for and where you want to search. By anticipating who you’re likely to need in the next month, six months, or year, you can spend the time you have now clarifying job duties and evaluating your prior sources of legal support talent to determine where it’s most profitable to spend your time. When you need new talent, you’re ready to go with clear, relevant job descriptions and a list of the places that are most likely to yield good candidates.
- Evaluate your work. During and after the hiring process, take the time to evaluate how things are going. How long did it take to receive responses from promising candidates? Did any top candidates disappear before the end of the process? How satisfied is your organization with the results? Use the results of this evaluation to modify your approach now, before the next round of hiring begins.
- Work with a recruiter. Staffing firms specialize in gaining the knowledge of the industry and the understanding of their clients needed to anticipate hiring needs and to move proactively to meet them.
At Kent Legal, our recruiters can help you take a proactive approach to hiring legal support professionals in Toronto. Contact us today to learn more legal support recruiting services in Toronto.