Pepper Hamilton Hiring Partner: If Interview Hypo Scares You Off, This Isn’t the Place for You
Not everyone does well in Pepper Hamilton’s new interactive interviewing process.
The law firm puts job candidates through a three-part interview process that includes hypothetical legal questions. Some people do freeze during the “interactive simulation,” hiring partner Michael Subak tells the Careerist blog.
“Yeah, it happens,” Subak told the publication. “I’ve frozen in court, too. It happens in conversations; some discussions do go flat. It’s happened with some of our best candidates. Some do well in interactive interviews, and some don’t. We don’t pound away at them.”
Subak explained how the interactive questioning works. Lawyers will tell the job candidate about a hypothetical phone call from a client with legal questions. “For instance, the issue might be how to deal with texting at schools,” he said. “If you had to advise parents or a school district on setting a policy, we’d ask about what issues might come into play.”
Subak says he’s heard that some people are so turned off by the idea of hypothetical questions in an interview that they’ve withdrawn from the process. “If it scares people off, this is probably not the place for them,” he tells the Careerist. “If you give it a shot, it’s not an intimidating process.”
