Survey data on how in-house lawyers found their current position

Here is an informative paragraph from the 2010 In-House Global Salary & Benefits Survey conducted by Laurence Simons (pg. 9). “Over a third (37%) of respondents found their current role through recruitment consultancies like Laurence Simons. The second most common route was through personal contacts (15%), nearly 12% had been approached by their employer and just over 10% had found the role through an online job-board. Less than 1% of the sample had used social media to find their job, although the increasing popularity of such tools leads us to expect much higher numbers in our next survey.”

Print advertising accounted for a bit more than nine percent as did internal promotions. The final category, “professional network,” had seven percent. As did Laurence Simons, it surprised me that the social media, especially LinkedIn and its professional counterparts, did so poorly. Job hunting stands out on those sites and accounts for much of their presumed allure. It may be that current employers found lawyers through the sites and then approached them.

Laurence Simons gathered 1,900 responses, which is enormous. Given that it is a leading global recruitment consultancy, the responses might be tipped a bit toward that method of locating a job, but still the empirical data is most welcome (See my post of March 23, 2009: counterpart data from AsiaPacific; and March 1, 2010: Microsoft runs attorney-wanted ads.). To request a copy of the full survey, write Naveen Tuli.