Customizing Your Legal Resume: Targeting Specific Jobs
If you’re a working attorney looking to transition to a new legal job — whether that job is with a private law firm or an in-house legal department — then it may have been awhile since you’ve actually taken the time to reflect on and update your resume.
Far too often, candidates fail to recognize the importance of specifically tailoring the structure and presentation of their resume to target a particular legal job. Candidates instead devote much of their time writing customized cover letters — a necessary task, of course, but it should not blind the candidate to the value of a well-executed resume. As a working attorney, the sum of your lifetime educational and career background is enough to construct a diverse range of resumes, each of which might uniquely highlight certain skills, experiences, and interests.
How can you best tailor your resume to target a specific law job? Consider the following.
Emphasize Specialized Skills
Try not to make your resume overly difficult to process (i.e., presenting too much detail on experiences that are not particularly relevant to the position you’re targeting). When an employer scans your resume, they should be able to derive all necessary information regarding your skills and experience.
To make your resume simultaneously more succinct and powerful, the key is to highlight particular skills and experiences that apply to the position that you’re applying for. For example, if you are applying for a position with the in-house legal department of a major software development company, you might want to emphasize specific work experiences you’ve had related to the software development industry.
Consider The Organizational Mission
When applying, make sure to take the time to research the employer — their mission, their history, and their current trajectory. All these factors contribute to the identity of a particular firm or company. Your resume should be designed to appeal to the publicly represented identity of the firm or company that you’re applying to.
For example, if the firm you’re applying to greatly emphasizes its community contributions, then you are likely to benefit from tailoring your resume so as to highlight your pro bono and community work experiences.
Use Hard Numbers to Demonstrate Real Experience
Your future employer is likely to encounter substantial diversity when it comes to the “density” of an attorney-applicant’s work experiences — as such, a scan of your resume work timeline may not give the employer enough information with which to glean your real, developed experience.
For example, let’s compare two junior attorneys working in corporate transactions. In two years of junior associate work at private law firms, one attorney may have worked on over thirty transactions, while the other may have only worked on a dozen such transactions. If both attorneys applied to the same position, it would be quite difficult for the employer to recognize the real differences in experience between the two attorneys.
Consider including hard numbers (i.e., if you are a patent attorney, you would include how many patents you’ve helped prosecute) in your resume to give potential employers a clearer understanding of your total experience.
Simplify Your Education Section
If you are some years out of law school, it may be time to begin simplifying your education section. Keep only relevant information, and perhaps significant accolades or activities (such as a position on law review). Any activities and accolades of low relevance should be removed.
Your education section should require only a quick glance so that the employer can focus on the meat of the resume — your work experience and qualifications. Try to present your educational background with as little fluff as possible. Any further elaboration can be accomplished via your cover letter, or can be discussed during your interview.
—
Here at Garb Jaffe & Associates, we provide resume consulting services as a key component of our overall legal recruitment service. Our team will help you update your resume and tailor it to effectively target certain employers.
If you’re an attorney looking for a new position, consider speaking with one of our Los Angeles legal recruiters. We have extensive experience placing attorneys with prestigious law firms and large corporations located across California, and will advise throughout the recruitment process so that you can secure an ideal placement.
Call us today at (310) 207-0727 for a free consultation.