The thing I am noticing this year is that work experience people want to come back. They do a week’s job-shadowing and you get a nice letter of thanks asking if they can return later in the year. No bad thing of course. Most students are delightful, interesting and no doubt want to keep the link going and build up experience. No reason why they should not. What they want of course is to make it easier to get a job, and who can blame them?

People are desperate and want any chance of getting a foothold on what they think will be a lucrative career. What surprises me is, when you have a vacancy, just how difficult it is to recruit. A firm like ours might get 50 applications for a trainee contract. No doubt large firms get hundreds. I was told recently of three vacancies in a firm which resulted in 800 applications.

How do you sift through these and make a shortlist, let alone get the right person? Applications are (usually) well-typed covering letters with copious CVs. There is no shortage of people who have good qualifications. To get on any law course you now seem to need three grade A A-levels and a mind quiet enough not to be kept awake by a student debt the size of a small country.

Applications seem to be identical. There must be a company churning these out somewhere. They all say the applicant is a good team player and why they have chosen your firm named … because of its well-known reputation in … law. Fill in the blanks. Hint to applicants: the word processor is wonderful, but don’t forget that when you have just written to Bloggs & Co, who you have chosen because of their reputation as floating log litigation experts, to change the text when you write the next letter to Smith & Co for their reputation in … litigation.

What I want to know as a prospective employer is:

  • How do they get on with people?
  • Will they make (hopefully at some time in their career) money? Preferably for me.

I do not particularly care whether they went to the right university, the wrong school, or no school at all.

How do you answer those questions? You might show you get on with people because you help out in a care home, or captain the netball team, or have put up with me on work experience. You might show an ability to make money by having read in the press about legal aid cuts or how IT is affecting conveyancing, or you worked in a shop and realised that if you provide a good service people come back.

Mentioning any of these things would make you stand out from the rest.