Transcript
"Last week you mentioned again, the need to convey to a potential employer that you can be managed. How do you balance communicating that with also conveying that you can work independently without supervision, which sometimes is listed as a criterion in job postings?"
Okay. That's a great question. One of the things that's most important to people that are giving you work is that you will do work in the way that they want it done. So being managed means that you have the ability to take their suggestions about how to do things and to integrate those into the way things are done. Certain law firms will have certain ways of writing motions and briefs, and responding to things and certain rules that need to be followed. And so you need to follow those. But you can certainly follow those rules the way you want. And then, as long as you're following them you can do things without supervision. What people that are giving you work typically don't like is if you're asking too many questions, you're asking questions just for the sake of asking questions, they don't like that. They want you to try to go get the answers to questions on your own without having them answer them.
I remember when I was in my second summer of law school, I was working in this giant New York law firm. And they were having me to do corporate work. And I was given these assignments by these partners and would say something like, "Go do this with a stock prospectus and then blah, blah, blah." And I had no idea what they were talking about. So then I would go back to a partner. I remember there was one next door to me. And I said, "I have a question about this." and he said, "I don't have time for this effing bullshit, leave me alone" or something. And something to the extent of that happened a couple of times. And I realized that I was expected to figure out everything on my own and work independently without supervision.
You need to give people the idea that you will follow the rules of the employer and do things the way they want them done, but at the same time can figure that out and answer questions on your own. And I hope that helps. But I know that we have that problem a lot in our company where typically what happens, and one of the reasons that there's a bias towards younger people, many times than older people, is that older people have their way of doing things. It's not that they can't learn, but most of them are resistant to learning. If they've been doing things a certain way for a long time, they're happy to do it that way, and that's all they really want to do. And that typically is one of the reasons there's a bias towards younger people. Being able to show people that you can follow their instructions and so forth and you're willing to is very important. I hope that helps.
