It’s interview time again and many of you will be asking or wondering (or should be), how do I prepare for OCI bidding? Here are five things you can do:
1. It’s a safe bet that employers may ask for your resume, a cover letter, your transcript and a writing sample. They might even ask for office preference lists (if the employer is interviewing on behalf of multiple offices) or reference letters. These aren’t documents which can be thrown together over night, so get started today. Don’t be the student (and there are usually several) who has technology issues with their documents the final night of bidding as time is running out. That can all be avoided if you get your documents complete and uploaded well in advance.
2. Research the employers. Don’t be too picky at this point in the process; that can come later. For now, look for reasons to decide TO bid for the employer, rather than looking for reasons not to. At this stage (you’ll do a much deeper dive into the employer prior to interviewing with them), do enough research so that you could write a personalized cover letter to the employer, detailing specifics about why you want to work for them. If they happen to request a cover letter as part of their application process, a bonus is you know exactly what to write!
3. REALLY get your materials ready. By now you should have submitted your resume (and maybe cover letters) to Angela for review. Set aside time to incorporate feedback and make edits to all of your application documents. Once you submit your bids, there is nothing more you can do but wait and hope employers see something in your documents that make them interested to visit with you in person. Employers are also looking for any reason to eliminate you based on your documents. I visited with an employer just last week who will not consider anyone with a typo in their resume or cover letters, even if they are #1 in the class. So put in the extra time to make sure your documents are the best possible representation of you as a candidate they can be.
4. Plan to bid for as many employers as you can conceivably see yourself working for.Remember that while you’re required to interview if selected by the employer, you aren’t required to accept their job offer. So why narrow the field too much at the bidding stage? Cast a wide net and then use the interviews to help you pare down your list.
5. Drown out the noise. Once bidding is complete and employers select who they want to interview, you are going to start hearing how many interviews everyone in your class has. As with most anything in life, someone is likely to have more than you and some are likely to have less. Our best advice is don’t get caught up in any of that, and just focus on taking full advantage of the interviews you have in front of you. I’ll talk about how to do that in a coming post.
Don’t forget we have several OCI webinars in the CDO resources section of our website, so we strongly urge you to watch those prior to bidding. In the meantime, please let us know if you have questions or how we can help you. Contact Daniel by email atDaniel_Hare@Baylor.edu or on Twitter@BaylorLawDaniel. JOB OF THE WEEK: Each week I highlight a job in Symplicity you might be interested in but may have missed. This week’s job is: 2017 Summer Associate (2L) with Arnold and Porter in Houston. Log in to Symplicity to view this job and apply.