Legal Recruitment, Personal Branding and Building Confidence with Hana Dhanji

Welcome to your studying law Around the world. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. This episode is sponsored by Contender. How are you doing on LinkedIn? If you're like 99% of lawyers, your answer is not great. Which makes sense. You learned LinkedIn as the place to stash a digital resume and share firm pressers, so no wonder your LinkedIn presence is somewhere between vanilla and nonexistent. But I've got good news. Since we all learned LinkedIn the wrong way, it's pretty easy to attract more positive attention for you or your business. Since 2022, Contender has been the. Premier Agency. Helping lawyers go from invisible train possible to ignore on LinkedIn. To learn more, check out www.contenderllc.com. Tell them Claudio sent you. Today we have the opportunity to hear from Hanna Donji. Hannah has an incredible career that has spanned from Canada to the US and now as an entrepreneur. So thank you so much for joining us today in the podcast. Hannah, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Claudio. Absolutely. And to start our conversation today, I'd love to hear a little more about your journey from law school to Wall Street and then to founding your own company. What motivated you in each chapter? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. So when I started law school, I had every intention of ending in corporate law and hopefully in carving a path to either partnership or opening up my own law firm. So there was a design of wanting to make an impact at a very high level in the profession. But one of the things I didn't expect was as I was going through the legal recruitment process and through law school, as somebody who doesn't have parents in the profession and didn't have a strong network pre-existing in the legal profession, I found that there were a lot of pitfalls and traps that I didn't I was either not aware of or didn't have the skills training or wasn't equipped to deal with. This included things like what firms were looking for in a candidate, how to build my own personal brand, how to engage in networking on what to even ask in a coffee chat or a networking setting, and most importantly, what skills was I not learning in law school that the market actually demands? Once you begin the practice of law, there was not a really strong understanding of what that was. And so despite my incredible success in terms of receiving multiple offers to join 6 plus firms in New York, I actually didn't even know what the right criteria was for selecting which firm to go to. So I wish I had had a coach who could help me understand what my values were, what my personal brand is, what kind of environments would enable me to succeed, what type of support or mentorship would best suit my style of learning, growth and development professionally. And without anyone to kind of help me distill and understand what that was and how to look for it, I found myself playing a, a guessing game with my entire career around what direction to take, what questions to ask and how to approach it. And so once I actually got into law, I found that there were elements, and I'm sorry to say this, but there were aspects of the job I was poorly equipped to handle. One included how to build my personal networks at the firm. You know, it was sort of more of a haphazard approach rather than a strategic one. The second was how to choose a practice area. And let me tell you, Claudio, it can't just be based on the work that you do, the intrinsic nature of the subject matter. It also has to be based on the rhythm of how the work is assigned. So for example, mergers and acquisitions tends to have periods of very high highs and very low lows. So when a deal is on, you're full on. And when a deal is off, you can have like literal downtime doing nothing. And there are other groups like the tax advisory group, where things are more steady because they aren't necessarily as oriented toward closing a deal. They're more on the advisory side. Or certain capital markets groups can be a bit more steady. And one thing that they don't teach you about is that your physical and emotional constitution should mirror the rhythm of the practice group you're part of. So if you're somebody who needs regular sleep and routine, you want to be part of a practice group that's a bit more steady, maybe like wills and estates or, you know, working with high net worth individuals on a more steady schedule could be better for you. If you don't need a lot of sleep and you're a high octane, high adrenaline type of person, go for the emanate shop. But there were so many things about psychology, emotional needs, your constitution as an individual that I didn't really consider and that nobody really coached me on. So when I left corporate practice, I said, what can I contribute to this profession that gave me so much? And I basically became the coach I wish I'd had for law students across Canada. So that's how it happened. That's amazing. It just because you mentioned psychology, if I remember right you also have a background in psychology is that is. That that's correct. I did my undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Toronto, studying everything from developmental psychology to cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and also abnormal psychology. So looking at all the ways that psychological compositions play out in the workforce, like behavioral psychology, but also how it can go awry. So abnormal psychology, when our faculties are put under too much stress, what manifests, you know, whether it's depression or anxiety or breakdowns and such. That's amazing. It sounds like you got quite the complete background for that by this point. You, you've helped so many students to land roles that are quite competitive both in Canada and especially in New York. And if you were to point out a few things that top performance students do differently during recruitment, what are some of those? Yeah, it's a great question as well. Most people think that there is that grades alone or the right work experience or the right extracurriculars alone will secure you a position and it's simply not the case. Out of the 150 plus students I have worked with across law schools in Canada, I have seen a variety of students from any number of different schools with a really like broad distribution of grades. Very diverse and divergent work experiences and extracurriculars land top jobs. And what really ties them all together is not the school they went to, it's not the grade point average, it's not the places they worked at. It's how well they can differentiate themselves as candidates amongst the pool of other candidates and how well they can isolate and articulate what I call their unique value proposition, which is of the experiences they've had. Whether it's being a janitor sweeping floors or a a waiter waiting tables at a restaurant or whether you were the compliance intern at a bank. Can you distill what value you bring to each of these positions that goes above and beyond what the average person in the same role would have otherwise done? Because even somebody doing janitorial work or being a server typically considered blue collar jobs can make a meaningful difference in the workplace just based on their positive attitude, their ability to work consistently, put up, put up their hand and be a team player. When their staffing shortages. Are they willing to work overtime? Can they identify inefficiencies in how the work is done and therefore create better systems, processes, and ways to operationalize the work that needs to get done in a faster, more efficient way? And can they can they innovate and train other people in the ways that they do things? So impact isn't about the title. It's about the ability to enter any situation and deliver value based on the opportunities, the gaps, the inefficiencies and make it a better place than when you entered it. That's incredible. That sounds amazing. So so I can see that really having that strong personal narrative plays a big role. And from what you're telling me, it has a lot to do with also the capacity of being able to relate that story. A lot of people have done incredible things regardless of their role, but maybe they they perform really poorly on telling that story and then end up losing opportunities because of it. So if I could hear a little more on on the storytelling aspect of it and how can students improve this way that they tell their stories to really highlight those specific achievements? Absolutely. So storytelling, you nailed it, is the biggest, biggest, biggest value that clients leave my coaching sessions with. Once we've established what their unique value proposition is on paper, we bring those stories to life in the interview setting or end in their coffee chats. And the way that we do it is we talk about something called the hero's journey architecture or framework. Now, the Heroes Journey framework really has five components. I'll quickly review them with you, but the first is to set the context. So no story is fully cemented in the mindset of the audience. If we don't understand who, what, when, where, why, how. So we've got to create at least an opener that helps situate somebody in put put the helps your audience. In other words, get into your shoes and be in the very moment that you're in. So I remember it was my second week on the job when I was a banking compliance intern. I walked into the office Monday morning, 8:00 AM, and I saw a strange look on my boss's face and I knew that something was wrong just based on that opener. In that storytelling exercise, you know what your role was. We know that it was a second week on the job. We know that you were an intern at the bank. We know that there was a situation that arose. And we always pick something juicy in a storytelling setting so that we can drop you in as the hero in that story. Step 1 is set the contact. Step 2 is to communicate what task you were assigned typically. So if you were an A lawyer and a junior associate at a firm, we might say, and you're interviewing for a lateral position because I work with students on laterals and once they've graduated, it might be what assignment were you given? What were the three obstacles that you had to overcome? How did you overcome them and what lessons did you learn? And the reason that puts you in the hero's light is because if you were given a straightforward task and then did the basic bare minimum to complete the task, there's no growth, there's no character development, there's no resilience. You have to demonstrate and there's no learning that happens. But when you're confronted with unknown obstacles and you're asked to overcome it, you naturally have to step into a new version of yourself that didn't exist before the task was assigned. You suddenly have to be the problem solver, the creative thinker. You suddenly have to be the person who can figure their way out-of-the-box using whatever critical thinking, analytical faculties, and teamwork that is available to you. And this is where anyone listening to this story will light up because there's there's novelty, there's suspense, there's excitement, there's a little bit of drama. And then when you methodically explain how you found your way to overcome the obstacles, you are no longer the person who arrived in the interview room. You are a new person in their eyes because they are seeing your progression from pre obstacle to post obstacle. And so there's an actual evolution that's happened even in the midst of an interview. And when you create that, it immediately warms people up. It immediately excites them. And they say I want you to work for me because I want to see what you can do when I throw something novel or a curveball at you. That's incredible. And and that makes me think of so many different things. I love how that, you know, the framing makes a big difference because really I'm, I'm a big believer that a lot of people who can make it into law school have incredible stories, but really undersell themselves because just this, you know, these specific skill was not developed enough of being able to communicate clearly and relate those stories in a way that makes sense. And just like you said, there are tools to do that. And I'm fascinated that you can help people to do that. And that's not just some something that some people have naturally and they just either born with it or they don't have it at all. So incredible to hear that and considering your background as well going to through Wall Street and as an entrepreneur as well, I can see that you've worked in in very high pressure environments. And then if you think about New York, could say the most high pressure environment in the world. So what? What are some lessons from that time? That's true. Shape how you coach and help people today. Yeah. It's so one thing that I didn't mention previously, which I think is really important here to note is that where law students, I think, have been conditioned over time through the education system and through their lives to base their sense of self worth on external forms of validation. You know the A+, the award, the grades, the praise, the accolades. When you get into a law firm, there is no pat on the back for doing your job. There is no praise. There's rarely a thank you e-mail, although some partners do that well, It's, it's just a given that you will rise to the highest standards, produce the highest quality level work and that will be your baseline. You don't get extra points for doing something well. It's an, a baseline expectation that you will. And this can often lead to burnout. It can lead to over functioning, it can lead to feelings of inadequacy. Like if I was doing a good job, why didn't I get the thank you or the praise? So the internal, the locus of control for one self esteem has to switch at some point from looking outward for your sense of worth and approval to turning inward. And if you don't do that quickly enough, especially for people who are more intuitive or emotionally like, whose intelligence is emotionally informed, like people who are more empathetic by nature or who are more sensitive to social and emotional environments around them, this can be quite damaging. Such that people with low levels of empathy will tend to outperform those with higher levels of empathy or those with stronger internal locus of control around self esteem will succeed over those whose self esteem is externally oriented. So you either have to not give any sort of like attention or care to what other people think of as a baseline. Or if you do care what people think and what they say about you, you've got to be able to turn that inward and give yourself the validation and the self esteem that you most need because it will not come from outside and it will erode your performance overtime if you keep looking for it outside of you. So if you ask me what it takes to be a successful high performer, it's not just about the intellectual capacity to get the work done well. That is a minimum expectation. It is can you survive emotionally and psychologically in an environment where praise and reward don't come from the outside? You have to be intrinsically motivated to succeed. And we talk in my coaching programs especially, I really work on confidence and self esteem with my clients at the tier one level. We we talk about mindset, we talk about their relationship with themselves, what they base her self esteem on. And this is one of the biggest values that Ioffer clients especially is how do we create that switch so that they don't just land the job, they're able to last once they get there and be happy in their roles. Well, that's incredible and it makes me think of how comprehensive that preparation for a new job can be. Very, very interesting to learn about that. Thank you for sharing it. Yeah. And and moving forwards to mentioning the whole idea of the legal recruitment that students go through, are there a few silent dealbreakers So to say that that you see that maybe makes good students, you know, miss opportunities or or maybe they don't realize this matter as much beyond the storytelling itself and that we just talked. To Claudio, you hit on my favorite topic, which is the unwritten rules of the game. Most people don't understand that there are unwritten rules and that your ability to understand them and abide by them can make or break your success in a recruitment process. And I'll just name two or three for you to give you an example. The 1st is that firms, particularly in the Canadian recruit, but we'll talk about the US as well, starting with the Canadian recruit. Firms look for signals very early on from candidates as to how interested they are in that firm over other firms. So how firms look for this is what order do you schedule your interviews in? So for example, if you schedule one firm at 8:00 AM on interview during interview week on day one, that's a very different signal than if you schedule a firm at 4:00 PM on day one. And sometimes it's just a matter of when they can fit you in. But I the signal that they are picking up on is you're more interested in the firms you you meet with first rather than the ones you meet with last. The second thing that is unique to the Canadian market is something called first choice language. Firms will ask students upon during the interview process to indicate which firm they would accept a job offer at before they've even gotten a job offer. By indicating that you are my first choice, learning when to say yes to a firm and that you are my first choice, and learning how to tell whether that signal will be reciprocated is very important. So the timing and who it's given to, I always liken it Claudio, to to taking somebody to prom. Imagine that you are going to prom and you have to go with a date. You can't go alone and there's your top five people that you would like to ask to prom. Your first choice person, however, doesn't answer your text messages. They don't really say hi to you in the hallway. They don't really sit next to you at lunch. They don't pay much attention to you, but they're your first choice. And then your third choice person is waiting for you at your locker every day. They sit next to you at lunch. They carry your books to class. They wave at you in the hallway. Claudio, if you could only ask one person to prom and you can only ask one person and they have to say yes in order for you to have a date, which one are you going to? Ask, obviously, option number three, Yeah. It is the exact same thing in the Canadian recruit. You may have one firm you love, but if that firm is not showing interest and sending signals back to you in the way and in the frequency they should, you should go with the firm that signaling interest to you. That's as highly ranked on your list as possible. I teach people how to look for those signals. OK, so that's number two. And the third thing I would say in terms of unwritten rules is that you can't look over eager. You have to understand what the firm's value in terms of personality because they are trying to hire groups of individuals as a team. They're not looking for individual superstars. They want a cohesive group of five 10/20/30 students. So you have to know what personality types they're looking for, what they value in terms of skill sets, and then how through the way that you present your stories, you can emulate those values. So it's very subtle, but we work on firm personalities and culture fit and this is another unwritten rule of the game. You have to mirror the type of candidate they want and the types of skills they value in a way that looks like it's organic and feels organic and not forced. And so I help build clients toward those types of approaches in a way that's still authentic to them. So if you don't have this down, you could be an amazing individual, but you don't fit the mold according to this recruitment style. Now we will say the difference in New York is that it tends to be much more merit based than culture fit based. So for my New York candidates, we focused less on individual personalities of the firms and we focused much more on transferable skills. So what jobs they had and what skills they got out of each job and highlighting those in the interview process to be as merit based and as performance least as possible. Whereas in the Canadian side of things, we're looking more at culture fit and personality and the unwritten rules of the game. Well, that's incredible. So we start with storytelling, then we talk about principles and and how we perceive, perceive rewards, and then we go into unwritten rules. It's no wonder that the law school edge your company has become a go to resource for recruitment prep. So moving forward, now that we've gone over these aspects, I'd love to hear what kind of gaps in legal education or in the support that people receive from their careers, office and so forth that you were trying to fill when you created the company. You did mention that you wanted be the coach you never had, but I'd love to hear even more on that. Yeah. So I, I give full credit to the career development offices across law schools in Canada for all the effort and the work that they put into ensuring students are equipped for the legal profession. But the truth of the matter, Claudio, is that when you have two or three hundred students in a law school going through a recruitment cycle and you only have a staff of 235 at most career officers, there's only so much bandwidth that can be provided to students. And the issue, and I'm I go back to this time and again, the issue is not do you have an adequate resume or an adequate cover letter? It's do you have written materials in the application process? And an interview strategy that's sufficiently differentiates you from other candidates. So if you're getting advice that's applicable to all law students, you might raise the overall level of what law students are producing. But you haven't told students how to differentiate themselves. What we do at the law school edge is I take a candidate, and this is the reason I work with them personally, is I listen to a candidate story in my intake session. I understand what makes them unique or special, what makes their story different from any other students. And we craft a narrative that differentiates them in a way that pulls them apart from the crowd. And so this is what's so important is you can't just be good when you're in a competitive process where there are fewer law jobs than there are students applying. You have to be able to be on the upper end of the bell curve. You have to be in the top 10%. You can't just be a good candidate that sits in the middle. You have to be on the tail end, the upper tail. It's a known fact at this point based on all the data that's come out from Ultra Virus and the University of Toronto student newspaper and the data they collect on the recruits each year, that in the 2L recruit alone, there's only about 750 jobs available each year compared to about 3000 candidates across Canada applying. So the success rate for anyone applicant is only about 15 to 20%, only 15 to 20% of students applying to the recruit the land. But at the law School edge, we landed 80% of clients in the 2L recruit last year, which tells us something very important. What we do doesn't just make somebody good, it makes them excellent in contrast to those that don't have coaching. And it's because we could differentiate them sufficiently from the crowd. Now the other thing I want to mention isn't just the success rates we've enjoyed, it's how often students come back and say, I didn't just get a job, I actually know what Ioffer now. I feel like I understand what the market needs from me. I understand how I can fill that and I have confidence in who I am as a person and not just a professional. So there's this transformation that occurs with my clients and I still keep in touch with so many of them two and three years later who come back and say thank you for all the tools you gave me. I know how to lead with empathy, but still not burnout. I know how to be authentic in the workplace and build meaningful relationships. I know how to get the work done and also advocate for myself. Like that brings me so much joy. So that's what I think is, is so amazing about it. Well, to to wrap up today's episode, I'd love to ask you if you could give one piece of advice to every law student who you know, seriously from the beginning could do in their education and, and get ready for the workforce in that sense. But also for those who are maybe constantly feeling like they're behind or they're bit uncertain and then they're here, these numbers and they get even a little more scared about the whole process. The one piece of advice is if you know that you don't have a mentor to guide you through this, if you know you don't come from multi generations of lawyers in your family who are networked in. If you feel like you know you're the first to kind of go through this or you don't know what to ask or who to go to, find someone who can help find a coach, get coaching, invest in it early. Because what I can tell you is this. I've seen people who haphazardly land jobs, don't quite know what the formula was, forgetting it, but somehow land it, burn out part way, don't know how to actually succeed, or don't get hired back after articling and they wonder what they did wrong. Landing a job is not the only thing you have to worry about. It's the longevity of your career. And so if you can get coaching earlier on in the process to understand what is the market actually rewarding? How can you position yourself accordingly? How can you develop the resilience and the skills not just to get the job, but to excel once you get there, which by the way, increases your earning potential over your lifetime? Why not make the investment at the beginning rather than flaming out or being asked to leave the firm or finding that you know your networks aren't strong enough to keep you there? Why wait until it becomes a crisis? Invest early and do it right from the start. So please, don't hesitate. Think about coaching as part of your tuition. It's part of the education that you need to bridge the gap between what schools teach you academically and what the market actually needs. That bridge is why the law school edge exists. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share a little bit about your insights and and all that people can get value out of your business. They really appreciate that. Thank you so much Claudia was a pleasure to be. Here, thank you all for tuning into today's episode and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode. This episode was sponsored by Contender. Check them out at contenderllc.com.