“Exhausting”; “Grueling”; “Competitive “; “Infuriating”; “Isolating”; “Intense”; “Tiring”; “Demanding”; “Distressing”;
I believe that the OCI process is really a super important moment for all students,
including for my legal career. I mean it’s really, it gives us a position that’s going to maybe potentially influence the rest of our legal careers, so it’s definitely a time that’s stressful and then overloaded but it’s really, really important.
The internship race in Ottawa is a little different from other Canadian cities or the processes that take place in other Canadian cities. The process begins in January with a deadline for students to apply. Then we have what we call on-campus interviews.
Employers have the chance to meet very briefly for 17 minutes with a series of candidates. Subsequently, the majority of offices will have another process that is specific to them, including interviews at their office, recruitment cocktails, dinners with candidates, going out for coffee. So all kinds of activities that really to allow students to meet as many, lawyers and attorneys from the office as possible. And it all ends at the end of February with the offer day where from 8 a.m. the city’s law firms can call selected candidates to make them job offers. I still receive between 80 and 100 requests every year for two positions. So from these 80 to 100 students, we select 20 to do interviews on campus, from these 20 students we do second interviews with 8 to 10 students depending on the year. And then we have a cocktail as I mentioned: a recruitment cocktail with 5 to 8 students to make one or two offers each year.
As an employer, the internship race really represents our opportunity to not only hire students, but to hire students that we want to become lawyers and even partners later. So that’s really the main way we recruit lawyers. Yes, we will hire more senior lawyers to join our ranks. But what we notice is the people who start with us, really stay with us longer. So it’s a very important process and that’s why we invest so much time and resources. It’s not really just for the summer, it’s for the internship, it’s to hire the lawyers afterwards and we even hope for the future partners of the office.
The role of networking in the selection process…what we have seen in previous years is that students who have taken the opportunity to meet or speak with members of our team before the internship race have normally had stronger interviews and I think the reason is simply because they felt more comfortable. So he already had the chance to meet the team, he felt less nervous, less nervous and therefore the interview was just stronger. It’s true that it’s a process, I experienced it when I was a student, which is very stressful, which occupies, which takes a lot of time and for some or many the results are negative. They are not able to find a job while competing for an internship. It is well known in Ottawa that several offices will receive more than 300 applications from students every year. The weakness of…the way that the internship race is currently structured, simply the length of time, so we understand, then it’s a little different for employers than students and that’s that the process is still quite long, but the reality is that for employers, a shorter process like they have for example in Toronto or elsewhere, I’m thinking in Montreal itself the process is much shorter, that’s that it requires a lot legal firms. And so the fact that it’s over 2 weeks or more really allows us to manage the process at the same time as our practices are already very busy.
I believe that the faults with the internship race are the fact that, yes it is too long but also that the interviews are not spread out equally. That is to say we apply for example the end of January, then afterwards it is correct to have a week where we do not hear much. Afterwards there will be a week where it will be all OCI interviews then in the middle of the month there will be a week where there is nothing then it will really be in the last week and a half maybe two weeks for a few people or the second interview then the third interview so the two in-person interviews as well as the events, either the cocktail or the lunches will happen. So it’s not really distributed evenly throughout the month which means that it becomes very difficult to manage, classes, work and yes also, like family, then friends. So it’s really just the fact that it’s long and then it’s poorly spread out across this month. So I found the second interview which is the first interview in the firm the most stressful. The reason why it’s really, it’s the first time you’re meeting the lawyers in person and then it’s not very clear what they want or if you’re going to get along well with the firm and then the lawyers who are going to do the interview. So I think that’s really the one that gives me the most stress.
I believe that there is something that can be improved in the future during the OCI process…each firm will surely have a cocktail or lunch and then the majority of firms will have their cocktail at the same time. I understand that this is a strategic decision for the firms, however I think that there should perhaps be more diversification for the dates of the student cocktails simply by the fact that not everyone will be invited to five cocktails. The majority of students will choose between two firms, which means that they will automatically…remove themselves from the list of one of their firms. So for me it would really be, yes I understand that it is strategic for the firms, I understand that it is better for them, but it is just from the student’s perspective I think that it is really a disadvantage and then it misses the reality that it is… the majority of students do not have five offers all at the same time. On top of that, it really adds enormous stress to the students because we have to make a choice when we don’t already have many choices to choose from. So it’s really…it’s just a step that adds psychological stress. We really just don’t need it, I think. We often hear and this is something that many employers will say: that we don’t know if we would have had an interview or an offer if we were a candidate today. So it’s clear that the quality of applications increases every year.
We have the impression since the first year of law that it is necessary and then obligatory to go through the OCI process but it is really until the end of this process that we realize that it is really not that necessary, it is not the only way to get a job.
