In-Firm Games: The Odds Are Not in Our Favour

Paloma van Groll

In-firm interview week fell on the November break. The “week” is more accurately 2.5 days: Monday, Tuesday, and a bit of Wednesday (“Day 1,” “Day 2” and “Day 3”). By Wednesday at 5:00pm, most students know whether or not they landed a job. This process has been described by students as “speed-dating,” “crazy,” “awful,” “draining,” and by a few sadists, “kind of fun.”

No one should miss out on a job just because they didn’t “play the game” well. But unfortunately, students do. What is this “game,” you ask? It’s about scheduling and signaling and putting just the right amount of love into firms during the week. It’s about leading firms on and knowing when they’re leading you on. It’s a complete mind game, basically. It all stems from the fact that firms only want to give offers to students they think will accept them right away. So on top of worrying about how their barely-broken-into suit looks, and trying to come off as charming-yet-brilliant in interviews, students have to be aware of this “game” and make sure they are “playing it” (well) to get a job.

A prime example of how in-firm interview week “signaling” screws over students is with scheduling. Because the in-firm interviews are condensed over such a short period of time for us, it’s physically very difficult to go to a lot of interviews in three days and give it “your all” at each one. There is fairly general consensus that going to four interviews in one day is, for most, an upper limit. Also, firms will often – on the first day of in-firms – ask students back for a second interview on the second day. But it’s not like you can just schedule interviews at any time you want – everything has meaning for firms. Putting an in-firm interview on Day 2 lowers your chances with that firm (while this is not true for every firm, it is true for most). It tells a firm that they are not high on your “list,” which makes them think you are not as likely to accept an offer from them.

The signals start on “Call-Day,” when students schedule their in-firm interviews. Let’s just take a minute to recognize how silly Call-Day is. Most firms will email students in the week leading up to it (randomly, throughout the week, causing a week-long fervor of nervous anticipation). Then at 8:00am on Friday, students have to either sit nervously by the phone and wait for calls that may not come, or answer their phone and do all their scheduling for in-firms within 6 minutes. In the New York recruit for American students, firms will usually let students know within 6-24 hours of their OCI if they have an in firm. Scheduling is then done via email (which is the same for Canadians applying to New York). There’s no pressure to screen calls on Call-Day until your ‘top choice’ firms call to give them a prime interview spot and then have awkward conversions with the firms you put on Day 2. It’s all done neutrally, over e-mail.

During in-firm week, students feel pressure to put a certain amount of face-time in with firms. This means interviews, receptions, dinners. It also means going back to firms they think want them. Thus, if a student is getting signals from a firm that they want the student to come back, they feel pressured to do so. Because it’s a short week, this might mean cancelling interviews with other firms to make room for ‘second round’ activities at other firms. Consider what happened to Bora. Bora cancelled his day 2 ‘first round’ interviews with Ya I’d Work There LLP and We’d Hire Him LLP, because all the firms he went to on Day 1 asked him to come back on Day 2. Then, at the end of Day 2, every single one of his Day 1 firms told him they wouldn’t be calling him on call day. He just threw away his chances at working at YIWT and WHH LLP for the shot of working at firms from Day 1. And now he won’t be getting any calls on call day. And even if Bora didn’t cancel his Day 2 interviews, just by putting them on Day 2 he has seriously hurt his chances of being hired by that firm.

It’s not fair that students feel like they have to cancel interviews. It takes a lot of time and effort to even get to the in-firm stage, and students should not feel pressured to limit their chances at jobs based on scheduling/signaling issues. Med students get three weeks off in January to go to as many interviews as they get for residency placements. New York firms schedule interviews on a rolling basis, so students can go to as many in-firms as they want. The students I talked to who applied to New York firms said they did not feel pressure to ‘signal’ their interest to firms, largely because scheduling and offers are rolling, and there is no ‘second and third’ interview game. New York firms will give out an offer after one in-firm interview (they do allow students to come back to visit the firm after the offer is made if a student is still trying to make a decision). Because interviews aren’t all on one day (both American and Canadian students doing in-firms in New York will go to one, max two, interviews in one day), students can put an adequate amount of energy into each firm, and “give it their all,” so to speak. Allowing students to go to as many interviews as they want and being able to only do one or two interviews in one day gives students much more agency in a fairly overwhelming process.

There also seems to be a real lack of consolidated data available to students in making decisions about firms. We can go onto firm websites and look at their student lists and see how many U of T students they’ve hired. But we have no idea of what the average grades are for those students. We have no idea what firms OCI/in-firm/hire ratio is, we can just speculate based on how many students they’ve hired in the past, and on how many teams they send to do OCIs for us. Sure we can look up the hire back numbers for firms in Precedent magazine, but none of this information is centralized.

Both Med and American students seem to have access to much more information than we do. CaRMS, the Canadian Residence Matching Service used by medical schools across the country, seems to have every data regression possible for residency program placements. For an example from the US, consider what happens at Georgetown Law: in June, a list of every law firm participating in OCIs is released to the students, along with how many spots that firm has open for interviews. Schools release last year’s “data,” which includes (a) how many students bid on that firm’s number of spots last year, and (b) the average GPA of the students who got offers from the firm over the past several years. To be fair, at T15 schools in the States, students bid on their OCI schedule based on a lottery system. Students rank 50 firms, and are then thrown into a lottery algorithm, which generates an OCI schedule; firms essentially have no choice in who they see during OCIs. Thus, arguably, students really need this information, as they have to rank firms based, sort of, on how likely it will be that they get hired. But, also arguably, we could use this information to prioritize our in-firm scheduling. While I’m sure most students apply broadly to as many firms as possible at the OCI stage, having a sense of how likely you will be to get hired (based on your CV and transcripts) would be valuable at the in-firm stage, for students who have to make decisions about scheduling interviews (and thus signaling). You might want to reach for that “top” firm even if you have average grades, but it would be wise to give a “safe-er” firm a primo interview spot just in case it doesn’t work out, instead of stacking all your prime interview spots with reach firms. Perhaps part of the problem is that students have no idea if a firm is a “reach” or if it’s “safe,” and this could largely be a problem of lack of information.

How do we ease the pressures of “the game”? We could do as the Americans do and have in-firm interviews spread out over a longer period of time, with offers being made on a rolling basis. That way students wouldn’t have to cancel certain in-firms for others, and to a large extent it would take the pressure off the scheduling game that goes on during in-firms. However, I do see value in having it all over and done with in the span of a week (er, 3 days), instead of letting it drag across a large chunk of the semester (or doing it in August as New York does, which demands that students are back in town a month before school starts). We could also perhaps have a computer-generated in-firm scheduling system, so that you have no control over which firms get which spots during in-firm week (which, to be fair, would require immense coordination between all the schools sending students for in-firm week). We could eliminate meals. We could allow offers to be made on a rolling basis, so that firms can start making offers after students’ first in-firms (there is no way a student can misread “we would like to make you an offer” if it’s binding), and can immediately call the next person on their list if a top candidate declines an offer.

If we can’t overhaul the system, a few other suggestions were brought up in the most recent Career Development Student Advisory Meeting, which could at least improve agency for students as the process stands. There was a suggestion that call day be Thursday morning instead of Wednesday at 5:00pm, and perhaps instituting a rule where no second interviews could be scheduled until after a certain time on Tuesday (or maybe even Wednesday). That way, no first-round interviews would have to be cancelled, and students could have more time to go back to firms on Wednesday.

I have one last qualm about the process, about how offers/rejections are made: it needs to be done in a much more humane way. Instead of having students wait by the phone at 5:00pm on Wednesday (Day 3), firms should send out rejection emails as soon as they know they are rejecting that candidate. There is no need to drag out hope for a student who sits by the phone, waiting for a call. It’s just not necessary.

In the end, there is so much “gaming” the system involved in a process that is about getting a job. Students enter the week with high hopes about getting a job, only to be spit back out on the other side, 40% of us, empty-handed. Maybe not everyone would have been hired, sure. But no one should lose out on summer employment just because they weren’t able to adequately “game” a weird system.

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