SLS Recruit Subcommittee to share alternative recruit resources
Each year, a dense fog of anxiety creeps into the law school along with the annual 2L Toronto recruit and lingers well past Offer Day. The air becomes heavy. News of OCI invitations and in-firm offers are uttered in hushed tones, carefully sealed in faint whispers, and float through the atrium. Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic. Nonetheless, it captures the essence of a strange culture of secrecy surrounding the 2L recruit at U of T Law.
This culture is met with a dedicated team of Career Development Office (CDO) and upper year students who work to strengthen the network of recruit resources available for students. The Students’ Law Society (SLS) is one of many student groups who have stepped up to offer additional support during this time.
“The SLS Recruit Subcommittee was formed last year, when it became clear that a huge part of the law school community struggled with finding jobs in the legal market outside of the formalized recruit processes,” says Dhriti Chakravarty (3L), co-founder and current co-chair of the sub-committee alongside Jamie Corbett (3L). Recognizing that only half of U of T Law students secure positions during the 2L recruit process, the subcommittee has set out to displace the emphasis put on OCIs and broaden knowledge about the practical legal market.
“Last year, we began a working group with the CDO to discuss how to mitigate the toxicity of an OCI-focused culture at the law school,” said Chakravarty. “For example, we got an email last year advising students on how to schedule interviews if they had received too many OCI invitations. While managing a busy OCI schedule is a legitimate student concern, failing to give any gravity to the issues of students searching for non-OCI positions or who may have received few-to-no OCIs can be incredibly damaging. This creates a culture where all students begin to lose their sense of autonomy to carve out a career path of their choosing. In the long-run no singular recruit or job opportunity will be the end of the road, but it can begin to feel that way when a singular path is over-emphasized.” The subcommittee is currently in dialogue with the CDO to find ways to better identify and meet student needs.
A key focus for the subcommittee this year has been destigmatized data collection. “We are trying our best to gauge how many students are still looking for jobs. This is a difficult metric to acquire when the post-recruit job searches have been somewhat secretive for so many years. It’s perfectly understandable that many law students don’t want to begin building their professional brand as ‘I’m still looking for a job’,” said Chakravarty. The subcommittee hopes to fill gaps in the current information available about the recruit. For instance, data on how students with accommodations navigate the recruit or the number of students who find employment outside the formal 2L and articling recruits is not well documented.
“Ultimately, we are working to create a community that recognizes the strengths of all students who were admitted to this Faculty. They’re all intelligent, hardworking, and highly employable. By not preparing them to search for jobs outside of OCIs sooner, we’re actively hampering their ability to compete for those positions against schools that have kept their students informed all along,” added Chakravarty.
The team has also created a Facebook group to share job postings outside of the recruit. “Jamie and I have experience job hunting on different job boards,” said Chakravarty. “We want to help students combat the fear and panic of summer unemployment so they can continue receiving a high-quality legal education when they’re not in law school,” she added. The “U of T Law Students’ Job Search 2021/2022” Facebook group currently has 306 members.
“However, this Facebook group is a short-term solution to a culture we want to change for the long term,” explained Chakravarty. The subcommittee is workshopping more sustainable solutions with the CDO and professional recruiters to build an automated channel that will inform students of available positions during their post-recruit job search. In addition to the Facebook group, the recruit subcommittee hosted a judgement free, confidential Zoom room to support students on Offer Day this year and a post-recruit panel featuring 3L students and alumni who took non-OCI paths to their current positions.“It’s important not to box students into one dimension of what success in their life-long career can look like,” reminded Chakravarty. “There are plenty of paths to fulfilling jobs outside of the recruit. Let’s find them, map them out, and make sure students are aware of them.”
