Law.com, Without OCI, Who Decides Whether a Law Student Passes the Vibe Check? Increasingly, It’s AI:
Prior to the 2020 recruiting season, law students vying for Big Law jobs went into the fall of their 2L year preparing for the types of screening questions they expected hiring partners to ask during on-campus interviews. What are your interests? Why our firm? To what do you attribute your success?
That application process has looked quite different for thousands of 1L students who applied for the same type of 2L summer associate positions this spring. In addition to law students interacting with firms directly, remotely, and sooner than they used to, many students applying to Big Law firms in the post-pandemic era are taking artificial intelligence-backed assessments and quizzes, or having their resumes scraped and fed into AI-powered algorithms.
Some are asked how much they identify with various phrases designed to expose behavioral differences between candidates. In other cases, a candidate’s mention of involvement in a varsity sport or law review could sway their chances with a firm. …
Since the pandemic shifted law firm recruitment away from OCI and toward virtual recruitment, direct applications have supplanted OCI as firms’ preferred method of recruitment. Compared to decades of precedent, the post-pandemic recruiting model means that firms now receive a higher volume of applications from law students at a wider variety of schools without meeting most applicants face-to-face. Increasingly, predictive AI is helping firms sift through hundreds of applications to understand which candidates have the highest likelihood of success.
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