While CVs and interviews remain foundational in any recruitment exercise, behavioural assessments in legal recruitment provide crucial insights that can significantly enhance in-house legal hiring decisions regardless of a candidate’s level of experience.
This article explores why these tools are particularly valuable in legal teams. It outlines a real-life example of what can potentially go wrong if they are not adopted routinely in recruitment processes, and addresses some common misconceptions about their utility – especially with junior legal hires.
It also examines in-house legal departments’ historically low adoption of behavioural assessments, revealing some statistics that may surprise you.
Understanding Behavioural Challenges in Legal Recruitment
The legal sector faces unique challenges in talent acquisition. Whether recruiting an in-house lawyer at junior or senior level, traditional recruitment methods often provide limited insight into how candidates will perform in real-world situations.
CVs showcase experience and qualifications, but they tell us little about how a lawyer will handle pressure, interact with stakeholders, or approach problem-solving.
Online behavioural assessments, on the other hand, reliably measure personality traits and predict job performance. They focus on qualities like competitiveness, empathy, drive, and analytical thinking.
When taking a client’s brief, if they tell us their previous hire didn’t work out, not only do we ask them what went wrong to avoid a similar mistake being made, but we take it a step further. On every recruitment project, we conduct a detailed assessment to determine which behavioural traits will best predict success in the position and use this in tandem with behavioural assessments on each candidate.
To understand why, it’s important to familiarise yourself with the practical application of this sort of exercise, and look at some real world examples of the use of behavioural assessments in legal recruitment.
The Role of Behavioural Assessments in Legal Recruitment
Behavioural assessments are sophisticated tools that complement traditional evaluation methods like interviews and technical assessments (e.g., issue spotting, role plays, or drafting exercises).
As an example, when recruiting an in-house lawyer, these assessments provide structured insights into such things as:
- Decision-making approaches: For instance, when negotiating a long-term supply agreement, you may want your lawyer to adopt a collaborative approach to decision-making, consulting with internal stakeholders (procurement, finance, operations) to understand their needs and any constraints. From that you’ll want them to balance any analytical insight with stakeholder input to reach a deal that aligns with corporate objectives.
- Communication styles: Most organisations want lawyers to adopt a clear, concise communication style, using simple analogies and visuals and tailoring their language to the audience—e.g., avoiding jargon when speaking with marketing or sales teams.
- Team collaboration preferences: When working on a cross-functional project to implement a new compliance policy, you may want a lawyer who has a style of having regular face-to-face meetings with IT, HR, and compliance teams, establishing a shared online workspace for document collaboration, and using project management tools to track progress.
- Leadership potential: Succession planning considerations mean that most clients will want to hire someone with some leadership potential so that they can mentor junior legal staff and paralegals, delegate appropriately, provide constructive feedback and create challenging opportunities for fellow team members to interact directly with the business at every level.
- Stress management capabilities: When handling a number of high-stakes deals or disputes concurrently, you will almost certainly want your lawyers to maintain a level of composure under pressure, prioritise effectively and delegate appropriately whilst also maintaining their own well-being and encouraging others on a legal team to do the same.
- Problem-solving methodologies: When addressing a potential breach of contract by a key supplier, you will likely want a lawyer who spends time gathering all relevant facts, then analysing the contract terms, assessing potential business impacts, and exploring multiple resolution options. Then, you’ll want them to consult with business leaders to understand the various operational implications before proposing a solution that balances legal rights with business relationships.
The size of your legal function is unimportant. The utility of these assessments is as valuable for a sole legal counsel hiring a second in-house lawyer and planting seeds for an in-house legal team as they are for more mature departments looking for cohesion. Whatever the situation, the best way of seeing how behavioural assessments play out in practice is with a real-life example, and the one that follows is an example of the latter.
The Example of ‘Donald’
Our example of ‘Donald’ is a scenario we have encountered in the past.
When the client came to us, they described Donald as a ‘bad hire’. Donald was a forthright, outspoken mid-level lawyer with 3 years PQE, recruited 12 months earlier by our client, a highly regulated business. At the time of hiring, the company had been looking for someone to help the general counsel supervise more junior lawyers and paralegals, and help the legal team to grow.
Donald had a very high opinion of himself and an inflexible communication style. During the recruitment process, the candidate gained strong support from some quarters based on levels of confidence, the accuracy with which the technical legal assessment had been handled, and the fact that he had worked in the same industry for a number of years before qualifying as a lawyer. Taken together, these are clearly all good indicators of future success. However, over a period of time since starting in the role, the business had found that he consistently rubbed people up the wrong way.
During the time Donald had been with the company, colleagues had grown much less comfortable seeking his advice on important regulatory issues because of poor interpersonal experiences with him involving temperament and ways of working. Junior lawyers felt he was difficult to work with. His manner was usually combative and impatient. He frequently tried to show he was intellectually superior to colleagues. In truth, Donald sounded as if he was turning into a little bit of a bully. As a result, the company then faced a performance challenge and several potential attrition risks with other legal counsel.
Due to Donald’s behaviour, the junior colleagues in the legal and compliance team, who were much more approachable and collaborative, were becoming overloaded and under-supervised. It was clear that they were now obvious flight risks.
It wasn’t that Donald was poorly versed in the law. He was technically outstanding – he graduated with first-class honours in Law from one of the best universities and trained and qualified in a magic circle firm. The problems lay in the commercial application of legal regulations and the way things were communicated to the business and within the legal team.
None of this was foreseen, though. The business hadn’t used any form of behavioural assessment in the hiring process, and both references the business received were the typical short, factual ‘official’ ones you receive from an HR department.
Behavioural assessments would have enabled the company to make a much more reliable hiring decision here. They aim to achieve a seamless cultural fit and would minimise the risk of hiring someone like Donald. So, it’s no wonder this client was happy to use them the second time around (and for every subsequent hire).
What Behavioural Assessment Tools Exist and Which Should You Choose?
A whole article could probably be written on this topic, and there are different applications for many of the assessments out there. A simple distinction divides them into those that are used within teams, but not in recruitment (eg Myers Briggs (MBTI) and DiSC) and those used in the recruitment process. Our brief review below focuses on the latter.
For the purposes of this article, we have picked the four most common ones that come into play in our legal recruitment conversations with clients.
- McQuaig: The primary recruitment assessment is the Word Survey. It is used by organisations in over 30 countries and is a cornerstone for effective talent selection and employee development. It gauges a person’s underlying preferred temperament to predict on-the-job performance and behaviours. A suite of other assessments is also available for use in recruitment and career development, making it particularly valuable for in-house lawyer recruitment.
- Thomas International offers a range of psychometric assessments for use in recruitment. Their assessments focus on understanding candidate psychology and behavioural traits. They also provide tools for assessing cognitive abilities and emotional intelligence.
- SHL provides a comprehensive, data-driven talent assessment platform, offering a broad range of assessments, including cognitive ability, personality and situational judgement tests. SHL uses a match score to predict candidate performance in specific roles.
- Hogan Assessments are widely regarded as one of the leading personality assessment tools in recruitment and talent management and Hogan says it has assessed more than 14 million people worldwide. Hogan focuses on a candidate’s ‘reputation’ – i.e. how others perceive their behaviour and social skills, to provide a view of their motivations and potential derailers.
As to which you should use, there will be loyal proponents of each of these out there, and companies generally tend to stick with what they are most familiar with, as do we.
These tools are similar in that they all aim to attain the same goals—to reduce hiring risk, increase the chances of success, and minimise unconscious bias in the recruitment process. However, they all do this in slightly different ways and offer various assessments, some of which can be used in a post-appointment context.
Ultimately, whichever you choose for legal recruitment depends on what’s most important to you, the extent to which you will use them, and your budget.
What proportion of companies use behavioural assessments in the recruitment of in-house lawyers?
In our example above, Donald was a relatively junior candidate when hired. When we asked the client why they hadn’t used a behavioural assessment at that level, they said, “We only use them for senior hires.”
Although they have now changed their mind (as a result of their unfortunate experience), we still find it odd when we hear this kind of reluctance from other organisations.
We have an idea as to why this might be the case and will come to them below. However, it strikes us as ironic that legal professionals, whose expertise lies in mitigating risk, often overlook risk management in their own legal recruitment process! It’s not what you would expect.
So, how widespread is this?
Of around 100 General Counsel and Heads of Legal who have completed Florit Legal’s Legal Recruitment MOT, only 3% use any form of technology to highlight the behaviours most likely to lead to an appointee’s success in the role, and another 4% were unsure. That leaves 93% of legal roles ‘going to market’ without any form of behavioural profile being created for the role being filled. Sure, everyone can describe the attributes they want, but not everyone can measure or predict these effectively in the course of what is usually a short recruitment process – two one-hour interviews and a technical assessment have their limitations. Whilst these aren’t the results of a formal survey, as respondents chose to take the MOT diagnostic themselves, they match what we hear from legal leaders regularly.
This, of itself, didn’t surprise us that much – who’s ever heard of running a behavioural assessment on the role in addition to the person? In all honesty, we hadn’t heard of this before we started doing it ourselves. But, if you think about it for a moment, if you don’t do this, how can you truly ensure a level of objectivity in the hiring process? And how can you regulate bias and instances of hiring managers appointing people who are perhaps ‘just like themselves’.
Interestingly, around half (51%) told us they define the behaviours a new role needs by benchmarking their current or previous best-performing lawyers, and a further 18% do so sometimes. So most legal leaders do think about behaviour; they just rely on their own judgement to measure it. Benchmarking against your best people is a sensible start, but it tells you what worked before, not necessarily what the new role demands.
How many legal teams put each candidate through a behavioural assessment before meeting them?
What surprised us were the answers we received when we asked GCs and Heads of Legal whether they put candidates through a behavioural assessment before meeting them for the first time. Only 11% said they did, with 19% saying they would do so, but “only for leadership roles.” This leaves 70% of legal departments not doing any form of behavioural assessment at all when recruiting an in-house lawyer. That’s despite three-quarters (75%) of the legal leaders who have taken our MOT telling us they had experienced behavioural issues with a colleague that left them questioning that person’s fit. That’s a lot of really useful information being ignored.
The situation is even worse if we take out senior leadership positions. That leaves 89% of legal functions not doing any form of behavioural assessment below leadership level.
You might think it odd that the company’s ‘risk mitigators’ don’t look to minimise the risks in their legal recruitment process. So do we.
Rather than looking for a recruitment fee rebate, and then facing another, often challenging, recruitment process if things haven’t worked out, isn’t it better to just get it right first time?
The Argument For Behavioural Assessments in Legal Recruitment
Behavioural assessments have gained popularity in recruitment processes generally, with many organisations reporting positive outcomes. However, independently reported metrics on their effectiveness can be limited due to the proprietary nature of many assessment tools and the variability in how companies implement and measure their success.
The commonly reported benefits of behavioural assessments are:
- Reduction of Turnover: One of the most commonly cited metrics is the reduction in employee turnover. Our experience over the last 8 years is that 97% of placements made using our LTAR® system (which incorporates McQuaig behavioural technologies) are still with the company after the first 12 months. The figure for the first 2 years is still high at 92%.
- Objective Evaluation: Behavioural assessments provide hiring managers with objective data that supplements traditional CV reviews and interviews when evaluating an in-house lawyer. By measuring behavioural traits and competencies in a data-driven manner, these assessments help mitigate unconscious bias and ensure fairness in the recruitment process.
- Predictive Accuracy: One of the most significant advantages of behavioural tests is their predictive accuracy in forecasting successful job performance. A major 2022 review of selection research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Paul Sackett and colleagues, found that structured interviews were the strongest single predictor of job performance, and that personality measures predict better when tailored to the job. The practical lesson is to combine methods: a behavioural assessment that shapes a structured interview is stronger than either alone.
- Cultural Fit. By evaluating core competencies and aligning them with the values of an organisation, behavioural assessments help identify candidates who fit seamlessly into a company’s unique culture.
- Candidate Experience. Let’s not forget the individual. Behavioural assessments not only offer an opportunity for individuals to demonstrate their ability in a structured, objective manner, but they also create a favourable perception of the objectivity, transparency and thoroughness of a particular hiring process. Ultimately, no in-house lawyer wants to find themselves in a role that either stretches them to breaking point or stops them from being themselves.
- Career Development. Another benefit to both sides is that by identifying skills gaps or behavioural gaps in a candidate, employers can identify the training opportunities and professional challenges that will support their future professional development.
Why aren’t behavioural assessments used more widely in Legal Recruitment, and in particular below leadership roles?
When our client says “we don’t think behavioural assessments are necessary for junior roles” what are they really saying?
Do they think that they are too time consuming?
Or too expensive?
Or both?
And what does this mean to the candidate?
Arguably this particular client’s perspective (and there are others like them) overlooks the fact that junior hires often require more support and development than senior ones. Given that one of their benefits is helping to create targeted development plans for appointees from day one, we believe they are always necessary! So, we always use them.
If the organisation disagrees, doesn’t it sound a little bit like junior candidates aren’t important enough? Aren’t they worth investing in? Or is it simply that some of the psychometric tools out there are quite expensive – so perhaps aren’t “justifiable” below senior levels on a cost benefit analysis? Maybe.
When it comes to time and cost, it helps to think of it this way:
Time
Whilst some time investment is required, it’s minimal compared to the wasted time and aggravation of correcting a bad hire. A McQuaig job profile takes most of our hiring managers between 6 minutes and 15 minutes to complete. When recruiting an in-house lawyer, factoring in 30-60 minutes to read each candidate report and prepare for each interview, the time saved in the long run is huge.
Firstly, you are given the exact behavioural questions to ask that particular candidate – so you don’t have to spend time thinking of your own, and you can involve other people in the recruitment process who aren’t as experienced at interviewing as you might be. All the guidance you both need is right in front of you. In the longer run, if you use the tools correctly, you are much less likely to be distracted by performance issues once the appointee starts work.
Costs
In its 2017 report ‘Perfect Match’, the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) calculated that a poor hire at mid-manager level on a £42,000 salary could cost a business more than £132,000 – over three times their annual salary – once wasted salary, training, lost productivity and staff turnover are counted. Nearly a decade later, applying this to a mid-level PQE London lawyer on £110,000 per annum, the same multiple points to a cost of potentially more than £330,000.
Research from the Harvard Business Review estimates that a bad hire can cost 1.5 times their annual salary in lost productivity alone (which might be even higher if a lawyer is working on high value, revenue-enhancing deals). The big risk factor though is reputational damage. And this is particularly true with legal and compliance. In highly regulated industries a bad hire can lead to serious consequences if mistakes are made.
Whilst the median legal team size by headcount in the FTSE 100 typically hovers around the 80-90 mark, the vast majority of legal teams are much smaller. Outside the FTSE, the average-sized legal team is generally around half a dozen strong (including paralegals and support staff). With teams this small, is it really worth upsetting the dynamics with someone who may not fit in?
We would argue it’s really not worth the risk.
Why behavioural assessments are just as important on junior legal roles
Most clients we work with use behavioural assessments for senior recruitment projects without a second thought. But extending them to the evaluation of junior legal talent may actually prove to be just as valuable to you in the long run.
In our experience with clients who are ‘believers’, behavioural technology can actually serve to increase the talent pool available on your shortlist.
Here’s how:
- Identifying Development Potential: These tools help identify candidates with strong potential for growth or adaptation, even if they lack the experience or the precise specialism you thought you needed. Behavioural assessments reveal important traits such as learning agility, adaptability, resilience and the ability to collaborate. So, with a flexible approach, your legal team can take someone who might not otherwise have made the shortlist and end up with the ideal set of behaviours in someone with the enthusiasm, drive and ability to learn very quickly and adapt to being an in-house lawyer.
- Accommodating Limited Work Histories: Since less experienced lawyers have shorter track records, it makes it harder to evaluate their potential through traditional means. Behavioural assessments help bridge this information gap by providing objective insights into working styles and capabilities, to help you identify the people who have the long-term potential you need.
- Risk Mitigation: For many organisations, junior in-house lawyers represent a significant investment in future talent. Behavioural assessments help reduce the risk of a poor fit by identifying potential development areas early; highlighting strengths that can be leveraged to your advantage; and providing insights for targeted onboarding support.
- Enhancing the Interview Process: One of the most valuable aspects of behavioural assessments is how they enhance the process and make for more meaningful interview dialogue. Firstly, they provide interviewers with structured discussion points. These include highlighting specific topics to explore in the interview, tailored to each candidate, target questions about past behaviours, and opportunities to discuss potential challenges. Secondly, the deeper insights you receive allow you to spend less time on ‘general’ interview questions, and get to the points that really matter more quickly – such as future potential and development areas.
How might this play out in real life?
A common example of this in practice is the organisation which has a shortage of relevant legal candidates because the GC will only consider UK lawyers outside London under £90K, “with a 2.1 degree, who trained at a Magic Circle firm or top Legal 500 ‘national’ firm, and are currently working in-house on commercial contracts”. Nice if you can find half a dozen candidates that satisfy each one of those requirements. However, experience shows that this company might find itself a little short on candidate choices. Moreover, if the company’s legal department isn’t based in a city centre, and the “CEO doesn’t believe in hybrid working”, then your challenges will be even more acute. (Believe me, this does happen!)
Instead, the use of behavioural assessments and a flexible approach can come to your aid.
If you ignore the things that are “non-negotiable” (usually salary and location) and you adopt behavioural assessments in your hiring process, you can safely be more flexible on some of the other things (eg current specialism, education, in-house experience, and private practice training). If you do that, a wider spread of legal talent will be caught in the net, and you can then use the behavioural technology, with everyone, to identify the ideal set of behaviours that will advance the goals of your organisation. Here you are hiring for attitude, which is one of the most important things.
We appreciate that this isn’t always possible in the case of highly specialised niches such as employment law or construction, or in regulatory compliance roles in highly regulated industry sectors. However, whatever your circumstances and the recruitment scenario you are facing, in order to make sure you don’t end up with a ‘Donald’, why would you not use behavioural technology every time you hire an in-house lawyer, all things being equal.
As an in-house legal professional, you work hard to minimise business risks. So why would you not apply the same rigorous approach to your legal recruitment process?
Bottom Line
When building an in-house legal team or making any senior legal hire, it stands to reason that more information – when properly gathered and interpreted – leads to better hiring decisions. Behavioural assessments provide valuable data points that, combined with traditional evaluation methods, create a more complete picture of each candidate.
In today’s competitive legal recruitment landscape, behavioural assessments are not just nice-to-have tools – they’re essential components of a comprehensive hiring strategy. Their value extends across all career levels but proves particularly crucial for junior hires where past performance data is limited, but their future potential as an in-house lawyer may be huge.
Whether you’re building an in-house legal team, hiring a General Counsel, or endeavouring to fill important governance, risk and compliance positions, consider how behavioural assessments could enhance your recruitment process in a way that avoids having to increase the cost of using tools and technologies you currently only reserve for the most senior roles.
Review a selection of our case studies, and then contact us to learn more about how we include these in our recruitment process and help you to implement them effectively in your in-house legal recruitment strategy.
