Legal Recruitment

Lawyers are known for writing wills, affidavits and agreements that contain complex legal terms, but when it comes to drafting their own resumes they can easily all go awry.

Why would it be that lawyers are not a fantastic resume writers? In a tough job market, where legal vacancies are at a premium, a law graduate needs to emphasize some key essentials that are required in the present legal job market more than ever. Your past performance in a reputed company may help you to land a better job, but for most young law graduates their resume is everything.

A resume is more than a piece of paper. It’s an identity. The resume represents it owner before a prospective employer, therefore, you must know how to write a valuable and impressive resume. For lawyers, searching for legal vacancies starts with writing a great resume.

Writing A Resume

There are no hard and fast rules to follow while drafting your curriculum vitae. You can start your resume with your name, date of birth, contact address, phone numbers and email Ids. but, there are some points, which you need to bear in mind if you want your resume to work miracles for you.

• Keep the resume straight forward and try to conclude it within two to three pages.
• Avoid over-writing. It can confuse your employer and he or she could easily discard your CV.
• Give even the minutest detail of your academic career. An academic achievement may seem irrelivant to you, however, it can be of great assistance to your prospective employer.
• If you have worked in a smaller law firm, then outline what you have done. Give serious thought to your career experience because that is what the employer is looking for.

Young law graduates generally do not have the experience of writing resumes. In this situation it may be very wise to seek assistance with this through working with legal recruitment agencies.

The outlook for many law students who are seeking to get a training contract in the coming years is a bleak one.  The reality is there are many more law students graduating from the legal practice course than there are training contract vacancies and therefore many end up being disappointed when they apply to get a job on the first rung of the ladder in the legal profession.

The situation has been made even worse by the recent recession which has caused many law firms to defer some of their training contract start dates and reduce the numbers of training contracts they are offering in the coming years.

This has meant increased competition for training contracts and the numbers of people applying increasing each year as the next wave of new applicants joins the existing applicants who have yet to secure a training contract.

The situation is therefore difficult for many law students who often have large student debts but who are unable to then get a job.  The situation isn’t helped by the fact that there is a lack of knowledge and advice available to law students about how best to write an application to give them the best chance of success.

One ex-solicitor became acutely aware of this situation when he was part of the recruitment process for his firm’s future trainee solicitors.  Matt Oliver has since set up a website to give careers advice and information on how to improve applications for training contracts.  The website is called Trainee Solicitor Surgery and is designed to give much needed careers advice to those people who are seeking to secure a training contract.

Given Matt’s background he is able to give specific, targeted advice rather than generic careers advice and application help, which is often all law students are able to get from their university careers offices.  The process needed to produce successful applications for training contracts is unique in many ways.  Not only do the applications need to be prepared in a certain way, but there is an important and necessary research element that needs to be undertaken before any applications are produced.

Matt also offers one to one assistance to students who are seeking to improve their chances of succeeding with their training contract applications.

For more information about succeeding with your law training contract applications click here:  Trainee Solicitors.