Take 2 Minutes and Help Divya Sugand by Participating in This Survey – Qualities Recruiters Want to See in Every Single Candidate
I have recently completed my BA.LLB (Hons.) in July 2018. Like any other law student, I have also been active on various online law portals. These portals are designed to share information between like-minded people and offer career advice to help early career professionals and students shape into better law professionals in future. In this article, I would like to present a different opinion on what is offered by these platforms. My views are particularly related to the popular webinar series hosted by Mr Ramanuj Mukherjee and Mr. Abhyuday Agarwal named ‘An Hour With Law Sikho’.
Everybody being in a rat race, very few people take time and read a full-length article or participate in public discussions on career advice. In fact, I think we are a generation of trending podcasts and videos, where we find learning by listening and watching more convenient. Consequently, I found ‘LawSikho’ very interesting and began watching quite a lot of online webinars organized by them. I observed a common advice given by different guest speakers. It can be summed up as follows.
Your CV must reflect your area of specialisation
For hiring a law professional, a recruiter thoroughly looks at the candidate’s curriculum vitae (CV) to discern how much of a relevant experience that candidate has. By the term ‘relevant experience’ they mean, the experience gained in that particular field for which the job is posted. Therefore, a law student should do their internships and other extracurricular activities in the field he/she wants to get his/her job into. For example: If I want to get into a law firm which has its expertise in criminal law, then my prior experience in criminal law would be considered as the relevant experience for it.
However, I would like to say that, many law students/recent law graduates, like me, are going to be the first generation future lawyers, many of us come from challenging family situations/backgrounds, many of us lack confidence, undecided, in dilemma about our career-choices especially during the initial years. Even if we are able to put a confident front, many of us are then devoid of a proper network in this field, unclear about our approach to secure a job/internship until we enter into the real professional world. In such a scenario, the only option left to explore our area of interest during academic training is through internships. Also in the light of stringent attendance policies in law schools, what most students can manage is, three to four months of internship in a year, which is also often difficult than said. And I think, not only law students but students of other fields too, face such issues in their early career period.
After all, this, even if a student manages to secure an internship, we should realize that he/she first requires some time to understand the ethics of that workplace, get along with new colleagues and understand the nature of work. Considerable time also goes into writing academic reports about the internship experience. Consequently, the given limitation of time gives them a very little chance to explore whether it is their area of interest.
I consider myself decently fortunate in terms of my own performance and the supervision that I have received in the field of law. Unsurprisingly, my journey has not been straight but driven by several transitions. As a school student, I changed my stream from science to commerce with maths, not once but twice. Even as a law student, I tried different internships in different areas of law. I tried courts’ internship, law firm’s internship, judicial clerkship, research-based internship, both nationally as well as internationally. I also organized and participated in different types of events & competitions (not limited to moot courts) and tried getting involved in multifarious self-improvement programs. This is because I thought and still think that one can make a judicious choice only when he/she experience himself/herself all the diverse possibilities that his/her field has to offer. I thus wanted to leave no stone unturned. I wanted to decide only after opening all the major doors of career options. I basically did not want myself in a position where I regret my decision at the later stage of life because sometimes, there is no turning back. And believe me, it took me five whole years to figure it out. There are a lot of students who may decide early because of their family background in law or right mentorship support or sufficient exposure but there are also those who may take much longer than their degree period. And this is very normal in any profession.
Therefore, in view of recruiter’s expectations and our varied struggles, as discussed above, I want to raise a question, as a student/early career professional would you like to ask:
- Why does the career experts suggest students to do internships only in their field of interest when the students themselves don’t know what their specific interest is? Why don’t they instead encourage them to try different alternatives and then make a legible informed choice?
- Why recruiters see specific expertise in the young applicants’ CVs instead of looking at their overall experience, exposure, creativity and the resultant overall development from it?
- Isn’t the probation period/short-term internships not enough before recruiting a person to a certain job, to judge whether the applicant has the capabilities to match the job description?
I am keen to know your opinion and would thus like to request you all to comment the same below.
Also, if you too faced suchlike situation (as a recruiter/applicant) then do vote your preference on https://doodle.com/poll/dgekrtbwqqzynm66. The more people will vote, the more accurate will be the result. I will certainly share the poll statistics and voters’ suggestions in my next article.
You can also share this post and spread it to an even larger audience, if you find any rationale in my view.
The post Take 2 Minutes and Help Divya Sugand by Participating in This Survey – Qualities Recruiters Want to See in Every Single Candidate appeared first on iPleaders.
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