You’ll probably find that you have to battle with other legal firms in order to gain the best graduate talent, but what’s your best weapon in doing so? Well, according to a survey of 114 final-year Law students, it should be your website.
The survey, which was conducted by Interdance, questioned students at a number of colleges and universities, including London School of Economics, Kings College, Newcastle Law School, BPP Law School, Bristol University, The University of Nottingham and Oxford University.
While the findings suggest that personal contact, the legal press and word of mouth are all important to a student when choosing a job, they clearly showed that company websites mattered most. More than half of the students surveyed said that a law firm’s website was ‘an absolute must’ for researching potential employers. Meanwhile maintaining personal contact or spotting a press campaign only managed to achieve half that importance rating.
The research shows that students don’t look for the most tech-savvy websites. Although blogs and podcasts are often offered on the sites of many major legal firms, the survey indicates that students would rather have a site that makes it ‘easy to find the information I need’. However, making your site user-friendly is not as easy as it looks, as many students reported ‘hard to find info’ on a number of law firm’s sites.
The information that most students wanted to access were academic requirements, an application timeline, information about your firm, details of any work experience schemes, information on your firm’s culture and values, and an online application form. In the survey, 60-80% of students said all of these elements were ‘crucial’.
The survey also gave students an opportunity to highlight the ‘management speak’ terms they hated most. The jargon at the top of this list was ‘client-orientated’, which was followed by ‘dynamic’, ‘work hard/play hard’ and ‘professional’. ‘Forward-thinking’, ‘can-do attitude’, and ‘approachable’ were also disliked by many of the students.
So if you’re a law firm and you’re hoping to attract some red-hot law graduates, you should ask yourself whether your site is up to scratch. If you don’t have a site at all, contact websites4smes for a competitive quote and you’ll soon be attracting some of the UK’s best graduate lawyers.
Source:
Law Society Gazette
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