Jay Ruane

Hey everybody, it’s Jay here from the Law Firm Blueprint and we have something extra special for you today. So a while back, I gave a presentation called onboarding starts with the offer letter. And when I took some time after that presentation to actually sit down and think about it, I realized that it doesn’t just start with the offer letter, it actually starts well before that it starts when you even post the job. And so what I did in this next 30 minute presentation is actually walk you through all the things that you need to consider when starting to hire starting to bring somebody into your firm. Because as we know, when you add somebody to the firm, you can either add to your firm, positively or negatively, and you want to make it positive. So sit back, relax and watch this 30 minute presentation. Let me know your thoughts all about onboarding a new team member down below.

Jay Ruane

Hello, I’m Jay Romain. And today’s topic is onboarding your employees. Your onboarding of your team starts as early as the job posting, but most people only put real thought into their very first day. What I’m here to tell you, and I hope you take away from this presentation is that you can use the entire hiring process to imbue your team with your culture and camaraderie that is necessary to make a good hire into a great hire, and scale your firm faster. The reason being is that the minute you start engaging with someone who will eventually be an important part of your team, you are setting the standards for how they are going to be treated in your office, and how they are treated in your office is how they are going to treat your staff, your clients health, as well as their interactions with you. I mean, let’s be serious. If you are hiring someone, you’re either replacing a need or you are growing, you better get it right, where you are creating more work for yourself more headaches instead of less. I want you to think about starting off on the right foot. Making an offer for someone to join your firm is a big deal. It’s not something that should be taken lightly. You know, you’re offering somebody a job. And granted, employment isn’t necessarily a lifetime thing. But anytime you bring somebody into your firm, you have the ability to add to your firm or negatively impact your firm. And so you want to be thinking about it positively from the start. How can we do that even before we have hired them? We start with the job description, and the posting. One of the biggest areas to set yourself apart from other firms is with how you word your job posting. And I subscribe to the philosophy that just like jury selection includes getting the people you want. But even more so keeping out the people you do not want. A properly framed job description can attract the talent that will thrive in your office and eliminate people from applying who just would not fit. And if you’re getting people you would never ever hire to apply to your jobs, and then have to suffer through rounds of interviews with them. You are wasting your time you are wasting their time, and neither is good for anybody. So let’s talk about the job posting. Now, I have heard some other professionals suggest that you should have very involved rules for how to apply to your office. I’ve seen people request the resume in a certain font sign in a specific colored pen, or overnighted to a location that isn’t the office using a particular mail carrier in order to see if the person has a certain attention to detail to apply for a job. And I get it. That is a way to see how desperate a person is. But before they know what the job truly is before they know if they even want to work for you before they know if the job is right for them. Asking them to go through Herculean tasks, just to submit a resume is a tough way to start a relationship. I mean, think about it. You have them jump through all these hoops, and they do it. And then you get to the job and perhaps they take it now on day one they are expecting you to be this drill sergeant. Everything must be perfect place. And then you come at him with the hey, we’re all a family here and we want to get along vide and it totally mismatches the impression they got from the hiring process and it totally throws them off their game. I mean, I guess you could do the whole print your resume in green and use a purple pen to sign your letter. But you better have that drill sergeant vibe permeate your office and I doubt that is the atmosphere you are looking for.

Jay Ruane

So when your job posting, I would recommend two important sections. First, a section that lays out your mission statement, you might as well get by in as early as you can let them know what matters to you. And they can see if it matters to them, let them read it, understand it matters and decide they want to work at a place with this type of mission. This is important because if they can’t work within this mission, why don’t we Stein, get them out of the running as soon as possible. Let’s also define who will not work for your needs, eliminating people who can’t do what you need as an important part of the job posting, because you can weed out people who know themselves better than you ever could, in a series of interviews. If you want to see a sample attorney job posts from my office, you can look at this link. Once you have to find the job in the posting, you can have faith that the people who will apply it as close as possible to the role you need to fill. Because keep this in mind when you post that job. Just as you are judging your applicants, they are judging you. Now let’s discuss the interview process. I hope in the interview process, they have more than just you. It’s very important. For me in our office, when we do our interviewing process, we have three rounds of in person interviews, the first team that they meet is one of the partners. And then they would meet some staff and other attorneys in the office. And they come back to the other partners for a third interview. So that way we book in the partners but in the middle, we put the people who would be working with them on a daily basis so that they can get a feel for them. It’s important for both sides of the interview process to get a feel for the new person. I mean, this is somebody you may be asking your staff to work with daily, much more so than you ever will work with them. So involve them in the process. So you get by in offices can quickly devolve into cliques, and by having the staffers in on the process, it helps eliminate that when a new person joins. Now, it’s really after the second year of view, and definitely after the third, that the person starts to feel a little bit more comfortable. Because everybody can present really well in one interview, you know that key themselves up there ready to go, they’ve been practicing their answers to common questions. They’ve been reading articles about how to interview well, they’re really, really on point. It’s the second and a third interview where you maybe see some of the cracks, or you see the real personality come through because the pressure is off. Especially if they’re meeting with support staff and other people who would be at their level, there’s simply not going to be as much pressure because they know these person don’t necessarily have the hiring decision. Or they may be offering their input and they’re going to want to impress them. But it’s not like talking to a partner who’s making that absolute decision, and the offer of the job. Now, what we’ve used in our office to get an initial feel for people is a digital interview. One of the biggest problems I had was running people through the basic questions, I have no patience for that. And I don’t want to waste my staffs time, because we don’t have a recruiter or an HR position. So we don’t have someone who has interviewing as their job. So I found video asked by type form, which allows for asynchronous video exchanges. And what I did was take the top interview questions and have a professional person record them asking those questions against the screen. This way I can string together 10 to 20 really basic interview questions and get a quick, yes, this is a person I want to talk to her. Nope, they won’t work. And it really allows you to get a feel for a person with standardized questions. And if you want to use those recorded questions, I make them available to you all at the following link for free. The great thing about these recorded questions is that these are all the standard interview questions that you need to have answered, but can get quite boring if you’re asking them over and over. Yes, technology is new, and some people have trouble navigating this. But this is also a test of their competence and ability to adapt quickly to new technology that could happen in the office at some point. They could be uploading briefs electronically and the platform changes. You need to know that they can figure stuff out. This is one way to do it.

Jay Ruane

Now let’s say you’ve done the interviewing and gotten feedback from your people, and they are enthusiastic about a particular hire. What are you going to do? Give them a call and tell them in person that you were impressed. Your team loved them and you’ll be making a job offer to them. Call doesn’t have to be more than two minutes long. But before that call, you will prepare your job offer letter and once again, this is an opportunity for them to Embrace your culture, and begin to feel part of the team. So when that offer letter, you said, be sure to include a few things. First, let them know that everyone is excited that they’ve been selected. That’s important. So many people forget this. And let’s face it, taking on a new job is scary. You probably don’t remember it. But a new job is a major life event. And people need to go into it all jazzed up about what will happen for the best. So you can prime that pump by highlighting some of their attributes that people took away from meeting them in the interview process. You might say something like, everyone loves how upbeat you are and can’t wait to work with you. Or the litigation team was really impressed with your legal reasoning skills. Whatever it takes to toe two or three complements their way to make them confident that this is going to work out for them. And for you. Of course, in that same letter, you want to let them know the particulars of the job and the pay. And when they can be expected to start. I like to have them acknowledge that this isn’t a contract, but an offer for an actual job. So there are no misunderstandings down the line. And you know, perhaps you have a CLE stipend that you give to your associates, maybe reimburse mileage, perhaps you send them to training, talk about that in your offer letter to get them all excited about the place that they are walking into, so that they fully understand the context of what it is. And if you can eliminate all of that sort of anxiety, before they even accept the job, they’re going to be coming in on day one ready to go really excited, and really in a position where they can give the best of themselves in the first couple of weeks, because that’s really the time when they’re going to be learning a lot about you every day, and how your team operates. After you send them the offer letter, you can then send them a letter outlining the technology they will be using. Give them a chance to have their email their access to Slack or Dropbox, or whatever CRM you are set up. This is important if you are a bring your own device office, or even if you issue them a computer, let people get into import your contacts if they need to, in advance of that first day. Plus, people like being assigned their email and joining slack or teams or whatever you use, it makes them become part of the team. This is especially important if you have them remote, or hybrid. Now, how about the people who don’t make the cut, either in round one or round three, how you treat them is also how they will remember you. I can’t tell you enough how important it is to have an effective and professional system for letting people down gently, especially if they went through more than one round of interviews. Remember, like I said earlier, these people are judging you too. And you can retain your standing with them. If you don’t just go to them. Or you send a nice simple short letter telling them you are not moving them forward into the next round. You don’t have to say yes thing you didn’t get it. Just something simple. Like we had a lot of impressive people and have decided not to move you to the next round of the hiring process. Thank you. I mean, at this point, they know what you do. They know you. And maybe if they get a job at another firm, they can refer you business in one year or 10. You never know why create someone who thinks poorly of you by ghosting them. Okay, so posting interview offer. It’s all happened. And now we are on to start dating.

Jay Ruane

Now as a firm owner, we are comfortable with an acceptable level of uncomfortableness, I guess you would say, we are comfortable with taking risks a lot more risk than many people are. And taking a new job is a risk for people that may put them out of their comfort zone. So let’s talk about some of the things that people can be uncomfortable with. Where’s the bathroom? Are people gonna like me? Where do I eat? Or do I even eat there? What’s everybody’s name? How am I going to remember everybody’s name? Am I going to be able to actually do this job? Is this a cool place to work? I’m sure we could put up other things that would make a person nervous. You know, but the firm? What’s the firm culture going to be? Like? I mean, I’m coming in as a new person to an established team. Am I gonna fit in? Or is it going to be like oil and water? These are all the things that go on. In a prospective employees mind when they make it. I mean, everybody says, Okay, I want a job and submits a resume. They submit their resume, they get interviewed, they make it through the process, and now they have this letter sitting in front of it and they’re saying, okay, my life is about to change and their life is changing much more dramatically than the firm’s life is changing. And so they have a greater level of being nervous when confronted with that situation. So your job as a good owner of a business, as a good employer is to start to identify Are those things that make a person nervous and address those early on in the process as early as the offer letter. One of the things that we like to do when we onboard an associate is immediately after they have signed before they have started with us is we will send them a sort of bag of swag. The bag of swag allows him to feel part of the team. You know, these are just some examples of stuff that we’ve done in the past, we’ll send them a backpack that’s got a t shirt in it, a water bottle or a mug. We used to do phone coverage years ago, but it’s some stuff so that they can feel wow, I’m really part of this team and the swag stuff is important. Now, we do fleece pullovers, because we’re here in the northeast, I mean, if you’re going to invest 50, 75 $100,000, or more on an employee, spending a few $100 By putting together a swag bag that you can ship out to somebody who’s a brand new employee or associate is really a minimal onboarding expense. But what I’d like you to do with it is say in a note, okay, day one, you’re coming into the office, you’re gonna wear that fleece pullover, or that polo shirt, wear that T shirt, you know, that’s your uniform for day one. And the reason being is that everyone else in the office is also going to be wearing theirs on the first day that someone starts working for you. We do that because we want them to visually take in that they’re part of the same team. And we’re all in this together. There’s a reason why teams wear uniforms, right? There’s a reason why you go to most restaurants and chains and stuff and everyone’s wearing the same gear, it gives a visual clue of the actual team spirit that you’re trying to build. And so everybody in your office should have some swag from your firm that they can wear. And we’d like to do it on day one. So they come in, and they look like they belong because they’re wearing the gear that everybody else is wearing. And you couldn’t pick out the new person from a lineup. So that’s certainly something that I would highly recommend that you do. Of course, I’m a system based person. So part of our offer letter process, after we get her back, we have somebody reached out, get all their sizes for everything, in case we have to buy stuff for them so that we just have it in our database. And we can pick it out or this stuff and get it to them. Of course, for many of these things, you can simply have some of the stuff in stock, if you buy a bunch of different sizes, because you never know when you’re going to be able to use it. Like maybe you’re going to an industry event, you want everyone wearing the same thing or you’re going to a charity event, or you’re going to have a booth up at something, you can have these types of things in your storeroom ready to go. And really having the sort of Team gear helps. And it legitimizes you to some extent in the eyes, especially if you’re a small firm or a new firm, that starting out, as established firms already have these things, it immediately gives you a sense that you’re actually accomplishing something and moving forward as a firm together. One of the things that we want to do really early on in the process, start educating our associates so that they have the right mental mindset and knowledge. And we want to have a consistent mindset for all the people who work here, not only lawyers, but staff. But when it comes to lawyers, as a person well known in the community, I’m sure people watching this are given presentations about your skill set in your particular area of law. Maybe it’s about divorce or personal injury topics or criminal law, perhaps other members of your office are doing the exact same thing. You should be recording them and using them in house for training.

Jay Ruane

What we can do in this situation is actually put together a playlist on YouTube. And it’s an unlisted playlist. But what we do is we actually will go forward and have all of our new people watch these training videos, I guess you would call them that and watch our playlists. And this sort of thing walks them through, Hey, welcome to our firm, you’re going to be part of our team. This is how we approach cases. This is how we approach clients in that respect. That as you can see here, I’ve actually included outside videos like this one from Brene, brown on empathy, because as criminal defense lawyers, criminal defense lawyers need to have empathy for their clients, especially if you’re a suburban kid fresh out of law school who’s never set foot in a jail, it’s hard to sort of crack down sometimes they’ll just walk up to a person and say, okay, so you’re going to jail now, they don’t really understand what that actually means to somebody. So we use this playlist as a way of training all of the people who come into work for us, just a matter of how we want to approach things. And the great thing about this is if you run into problems with people as they work for you can say hey, you know what? I see you’re struggling in this area with bedside manner, rewatch my video on it, or if they’re having problems with communications, if they’re not necessarily following through with papering the file the way we like to do it will say, hey, here, watch this. It explains how we do it and why we do it, so that you understood In the context of it. And really, we put together this video playlist, and it’s hours long, it’s not something that you can just do in one sitting. But imagine being a prospective attorney, and you’re given a bag of swag and a link to say, here’s everything you need to know about what you’re going to be doing here. Imagine the release of anxiety that they would have over the two or three week period before they start the job. And remember, if they’re coming from another law firm, they have to get rid of all of the bad habits that they had from that place. And one of the greatest things that you can do in a situation like we do here is showing them, hey, you’re part of our team. And this is how we do things. It makes it so much easier for them to shed the bad habits and attach your good habits and the way things are going to be approached here. Now we do this not only for attorneys, but we also have some of the same videos, and then some different ones, for our staff that are coming in. And really, this allows them to get to know the people in the office. You know, as you have different people doing the trainings, they’ll know it, but they’ll also establish rapport with them without actually having to sit down with them on the very first day. For fully remote workers consider creating a short 10 minute video about your city or county, so they know more about it. And they don’t feel clueless when people call in and chat them up. This is easy onboarding stuff you will use over and over. So this is my lawyers playlist, and there’s 19 videos in it. I’m going to show you the different ones. But we’ve gone so far as to film all the continuing education that we’ve done over time. And as you can see here, the top one, our core product is DUI defense, it’s a two and a half hour video, it really walks them through everything that they’re going to need to know. And so we put that up there, because we want them on a Thursday night before they start in two weeks to really digest this and get their questions ready. And we really have everything that they need to be available on the first day. So they’re watching hours of video to prepare themselves intellectually, mentally, for what it is that they’re going to be doing here at the firm. And the great thing about this is 90% of this stuff is available to you with a webcam and with YouTube, you can create all of these videos and the thing. And this isn’t even my idea, I stole this from another lawyer and blew it up, he did something somewhat similar. And I decided to take it and really accelerated as much as I could go. But the best part about this is that you can make it unlisted, people wouldn’t otherwise be able to find it, because you’re gonna give away the ways you want to approach cases, the way you want to counsel your clients, you don’t need other lawyers and other opponents being able to see it. Remember, by having an onboarding system that your staff can appreciate, when they know somebody new is coming in, because your staff is also going to have some anxiety, you know, who is this new person? We met them for 20 minutes are they going to fit in? Are they going to laugh at my jokes, that type of thing, there’s going to be anxiety on the staff side. And part of our job as a good employer is to take away that anxiety on both sides. Because we want them to get rid of that anxiety and get them working effectively for us. So one of the things that you can do early on in your process, talk a little bit about firm culture. I have a colleague who’s a huge fan of the office. For him, they start influencing new applicants about the culture of the office as early as the offer letter.

Jay Ruane

Talk about you know what we look forward to do around the holidays, talk about all these things, you know, tell them we’re big office fans here, we share on Slack, a lot of gifts of the office. We’re big into new restaurants, we like to try every new restaurant that opens locally. And we’re big into the birthday cake thing. So let us know what kind of cake you like. Or we’re not big into the birthday cake thing, we get the same cake for everybody. And it’s a long standing joke. Like, I couldn’t imagine working for that friend. And then being in a situation where I’ve never seen the office. And believe me, there are people out there who’ve never watched it. Now, if that’s the case, how are they going to feel if they fit in, maybe give them the opportunity to binge watch it before they come in and eliminate that anxiety. Because imagine not getting the inside joke that 12 People are getting, but you don’t. I mean, that is stressful. And you want to eliminate that early on. So we’re talking a little bit about Systemising your onboarding, as everybody knows, the best way to approach any project in your office is to have steps that you go forward with every single time. And so one of the things that we did in our wiki, which is go ahead and list out all of the things that we need to do when we have a new lawyer coming on board. And so let me show you. I mean this is a step by step process that we will use for everybody. They go through the interview the offer letter start date determined everything. And the reason why we do this is because we don’t want to miss a step. And I want to be able to delegate this out to somebody else. So we have all the steps that are done in the order in which they are done, and we don’t miss anything by writing it down. So what you can do is sit down and say, if I were starting a new lawyer, or a new employee today, these are the things that I would need to set up for them. These are the things that I would need to do for them. And I want to have a list made up. And then once you have that list, you can add to that list you can take away, but you don’t have to think about it. I mean, there’s nothing worse than being away from the office and realizing, oh, man, I never added them to Westlaw, because now they’re at the office, I’m on vacation, and they’re supposed to be able to do something, and they can’t do it. So what you really need to do is think through every step, commit to it. And then that’s the policy and procedure that you will follow every time. There is nothing worse than you know, essentially having somebody show up in your office for day one. And it’s a dumpster fire. The phone’s ringing, nobody’s answering it, clients are complaining and they’re saying, What do I do, and you don’t really know what they’re supposed to do that day, that moment, it’s kind of a crazy thing to do. We actually want to have a plan for day one. One of the best things we like to have on day one is having contribute to marketing the firm, we want them to build their social profiles. This is just something that we do, because obviously, I’m big into social media. But on day one, we’re going to have them actually create a public profile for themselves, so that they can share their stuff to their network of people. Hopefully, they’ve already had some photographs taken because there usually is a lag time between accepted offer and start date, we’ll go ahead and we’ll have a contracted photographer that will arrange for them to get their picture taken in advance, so that we have it on day one. The press release can go out with a nice picture, it can be up on our website, we’re ready to go. Because we really want them to have a positive attitude and confidence that they can go on your firm’s website, and they want to say, Wow, I’m already up on the website. While these people are on point. You know, that’s really what you want. That’s the kind of team that you want to have behind you. And it leaves you feeling good.

Jay Ruane

Now, introducing the coworkers. What I like to do in the very first week of somebody’s employment, when you know, lunch is stressful enough when you’re working. A lot of times they don’t know, okay, when do I even take lunch? Do I eat in the kitchen? Is it normal for people to go out to eat? Or do I sit at my desk alone, that type of thing. And so what we’ll do is we’ll actually break it up and have each day have them go out with a different staff member, go find something locally that they can eat at or bring it in, if that’s preferred, and we’ll pick it up. It’s not that expensive to buy lunch in that situation. But allowing people to get out of either out of the office, or sit down with somebody break bread, have a meal and just talk about where they worked before, and why they applied for this job. And you can give your team members, your staff, your other lawyers that are going to go out to them, give them the opportunity to sort of pick up their brain, right? Because you know, you want to get to know them. They could ask Okay, so what’s your favorite restaurant and they come back and they tell you what it is? Or what’s your favorite sports teams, you put that in the notes. That way, if they do something well, and you want to congratulate them, boom, you get them a gift certificate to their favorite restaurant. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that is just phenomenal for morale, you remember, and I’m a big proponent. At the end of the first week, you had that lunch with the lawyer employee and say to them, okay, you’ve been here for a week, here’s your opportunity, you can walk away now with no questions asked, here’s a severance. We’ve paid you for this week, we’ll pay for a second week, if you don’t want to be here, do you want to be here? Are you going to be on this journey with us? Get them to commit to you in person that they’re going to be part of the team. Because by doing that, you really cement that foundation of the relationship between you and the employee. And that’s really important for you to really move your stuff forward to the next level. And the investment of a little bit of time, a little bit of money and the swag and the lunches really goes a long way to getting them solidly as part of your team. And quickly after that, there’ll be like they’ve always been around. And that’s what you really want. Now, here’s something that I like to do when I have somebody new in the office, a major source of anxiety for a lot of people, including myself, is remembering somebody’s name. So buy a bunch of these. And the first week that somebody’s in the office, everybody should wear them. It’s not hard, you fill it out, you put it on and you walk around with it this way, if they’re walking around the office, and they’re talking to you, and they may not remember your name, especially if it’s somebody who does the marketing, or if it’s an admin that they have very little contact with, but they were introduced to. It’s so nice to refreshing to have them walk up and be like, Okay, this is Bill, Bill’s got a name tag on it, and I could say Hey, Bill You and I can make that connection. And guess what, in a week, they’ll know everybody’s names. But it’s just one more way to remove anxiety. And it’s great. The last thing I want to talk about is Shadow days. But shadow day is also important when you brought somebody into your office. Because after they get there, even if they’re a lawyer, even if they’re doing high end med Mau, or mass torts, they’ve been doing it for 20 years, they really need to understand the context of everybody who works in the office, and what it is that person does.

Jay Ruane

And so what I think that the smart thing to do is in the first day or two of somebody’s job with you, after they’ve started, take some time and have them shadow, as many employees as they can, could be as short as an hour. This is something that I got not from another lawyer. But when I got into college, I had a number of friends who wanted to get into the fashion industry. And they all went to go work for Ralph Lauren in New York City. If you work for Ralph in the city, one of the things you have to do, you have to start on the sales floor, not because they expect you to be a salesperson. So if you’re in the marketing department, if you’re in the accounting department, if you’re a human resources, you start week one on the floor of one of their stores. And you do that, because it allows you to understand what the people at that level have to do, and what they’re doing on a regular basis. And so by putting yourself in a situation during their first week, people are a little nervous. And maybe there’s not necessarily assigned work yet for that lawyer. I mean, they have files that they need to get up to speed on, but there’s nothing pressing that needs to get done today, there’s no motions that need to go out the door today, they can take an hour and sit with the receptionist and get an appreciation for the call volume coming in. And what that reception is does, it’s going to develop a relationship between the two of them, they can talk to the case manager and say, okay, you know, I’m in litigation, because I’m an attorney, you’re a paralegal, let me understand what it is that you do. Okay, so this is actually what you do every day, the calling clients or calling providers I got it, it’s going to develop a relationship between the two of them, now they understand what the day is going to be like. And that helps them get a better sense of how the whole operation works together. They can even shadow one or two lawyers that are in different departments or have different roles than what they have, just so they understand how everybody sort of works together to move it forward. I really liked them to have spending an hour or two with the marketing department on their first day, so they can see what’s going on there. Okay, so here’s your social profiles, here’s how they’re researching keyword or creating content, it might be great to them, but spending an hour just sitting in the room with those marketing people and talking and understanding how, wow, these are great opportunities for this firm. They really treat this business like a business, and I need to be able to contribute and I want to be able to contribute. That’s what you can do. So things like shadow days and wearing Hello, my name is stickers are a great way to sort of break the ice and put yourself in a situation where the people who are coming to work for you really understand the context of how everything goes. Because you know, you go back to that old parable where you’ve got blind men, and each one is touching a different part of the elephant. But nobody knows it’s an elephant. Everyone says, oh, it’s whiskers and the other one says it’s smooth. And Ellen says it’s rough skin, but they can’t figure it out that it’s an elephant because they don’t see the whole thing. Well, you need your new employees to understand everything in the context of your firm as quickly as possible so that they can be effective in the job that they do. So as you see, onboarding a new member of your office starts with your job posts and carries through to the end of the first week. And if you follow a systemized way to onboard them, you will get the best out of your new hire. I’m Jay Ruane. If you want more tips and tactics for your law firm. Please join my free Facebook group. The Law Firm Blueprint