If you’re in the legal profession for long enough, chances are you will go through the experience of either being let go or of voluntarily moving on to a new situation. Regardless of the reason for leaving a legal firm, it can trigger a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety about the next steps you should take to resume your career after a period of job hunting.
The first thing you need to do is to avoid dwelling on any negative aspects of the separation from your old employer and get yourself in the mindset that what’s best for you now is to prepare for whatever comes next. With that in mind, here are a few steps you can take to minimize the out-of-work period, and get yourself back in the game.
Maintain Your Network of Colleagues
One of the most valuable steps you can take when job hunting is keeping in touch with all of your legal colleagues, and asking them to be on the lookout for you should any opportunities come to their attention. This will also help you to stay abreast of industry trends so that you don’t lose track of what’s happening in the legal profession.
Don’t be bashful about letting your friends and colleagues know that you’re in the market for a new job and that you’d appreciate their help. Just by staying in touch with all your legal associates, you will be keeping your head in the game, and you’ll stay motivated to continue your job search in the field.
Get Your Resume Updated
Regardless of how successful your career has been to this point, you should be prepared to update your resume with everything that has happened since the last update. This needs to include more than just your previous position, and should also entail any certifications or achievements you’ve earned in the interim.
If you haven’t been paying attention to your social media profiles, you should update these as well, since they are routinely consulted by employers looking for top-notch talent. The fact that you’ve made a recent update to your profile will also show potential employers the information on it is current, and that you may be available.
Embrace Job Hunting Mode
A wise man once said that until you have a job, your job is to find a job. While that is undoubtedly a simplistic view of the situation, there’s a pretty compelling truth lurking in there as well. When you are out of work, you should take job hunting very seriously, even to the point where you treat the search for employment as an actual eight-hour workday.
The point is, you can’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of having a nonchalant attitude about looking for opportunities because with that attitude you might only find something if it falls into your lap. You may be feeling depressed or disheartened about the circumstances of your recent job separation, but you must overcome that, and replace it with a positive attitude about finding new employment.
Practice Interviewing
Once you do have some feelers out with friends and you have some applications in at various legal firms, you could be called upon to interview at any time. You need to be prepared for this when the opportunity arises, and you need to maximize the favorable impression you leave with an interviewer.
Unless you are a naturally gifted talker, you’d be well advised to prepare for interviews as soon as possible. You might enlist the services of a family member or friend to help ready you by setting up practice interviews, especially if you haven’t gone through the interview process in a long time.
Along these same lines, make sure you’re quite familiar with your job history and academic history so that you can confidently respond when asked any questions about them. Also, make sure you have a pinpoint response ready when an interviewer asks you about why you left your last position. It’s a question that’s almost guaranteed to come up, and your answer to this question could either be a deal-breaker, or it could be something that earns you points with your interviewer.
Handling Gaps in Your Resume
If you’ve been out of work for more than a short period since your last position, you need to be able to explain precisely why that employment gap occurred. If you have several such employment gaps on your resume, they will also need to be explained, because they will be of interest to a potential employer.
The best policy is to provide forthright and accurate answers to any questions about resume gaps, even if they don’t reflect particularly well on you. It would be much worse for you if you were to provide inaccurate responses to questions in this area, and a potential employer discovered those inaccuracies.
Not only would you have lost an opportunity with that specific employer, but they might also spread the word around that your integrity is questionable. Good news spreads quickly, but bad news spreads like wildfire, and if local legal professionals were to hear about untruthfulness on your part, it might make your period of job hunting a lot longer than you expected.