From traditional law firms to NewLaw firms, legal startups to legal recruiters, a wide variety of legal services sector organizations are utilizing social media as a means to increase visibility and attract new clients.
In legal recruitment in the Asia-Pacific region in particular, Major Lindsey & Africa, Kinney Recruiting, people2people and Office Parrots are among a growing number of legal recruitment firms utilizing a blog as a centrepiece of their social media engagement.
Mei Chel Tan (@chelleytan) is the Founder of Office Parrots, a career website focused on helping professionals get a better insight into prospective employers in Malaysia and Singapore, and for employers to connect and match with qualified and interested candidates.
The firm currently covers legal, accounting and finance-related roles and industries. While the firm isn’t in the business of traditional recruitment per se, they have nonetheless facilitated many law firms’ matches with qualified candidates through its website.
Here are Mei Chel Tan’s thoughts on how social media has been helpful to the success of OfficeParrots:
How Social Media Helps Us
“At Office Parrots, we are passionate about introducing transparency into the local job market by breaking into discussions on salary, culture and hiring processes. Information on this is currently quite fragmented across different sources. Creating meaningful content has enabled us to build a community of hundreds of users that interact on our website and social media daily. This is one way we attract and match the right candidates with the best legal jobs available with our employer clients.
In South East Asia, there is limited career content that is specific to our region and each country in it. Most career content is static (i.e., job directories, annual surveys, etc.). A lot of it also originates or is syndicated from the West, which has a totally different workforce dynamic and socio-economic conditions. In response to this, we have for example covered personal career stories of local lawyers as a source of advice and inspiration to aspiring younger lawyers and addressed FAQs for fresh graduates in their first jobs on statutory payroll rules.
Localised content, through our own experience in covering market issues and specific challenges, has been well received. This in turn helps us connect law firms to the best candidates, who have the interest and capacity to think meaningfully about their careers.”
The challenge in Creating Content
“Creating good, regular content is a challenge in terms of knowing what the market wants. Since we started, we’ve always had a focus on local issues in the legal profession. There was minimal, regular coverage about salary rates, culture issues and the full basics of preparing for job interviews – so we picked this up. Through interacting with our users, we identified that these are some of the issues people were interested in, to make decisions on their career moves.
For instance, we recently published a list of the highest-paying law firms for pupillage in Klang Valley (Kuala Lumpur & Selangor) based on data we’ve received, which garnered a lot of attention from fresh graduates and firms. We were contacted by firms that wanted to be on the list and firms telling us how pleased they were about the coverage. We were also told that there was a salary revision at one firm based on our ranking.
This shows that content has the capacity to break down traditional taboos (e.g., talking about salaries), introduce transparency to an industry and can make a real impact. Embracing transparency helps our employer clients to attract the best talent, as younger generations increasingly seek such attributes in their prospective employers.
Once you understand your market, there is still quite a lot to be discussed in this region, so coming up with new topics is always a fun and interesting process, as not much has been exhausted before.”
Is it worth it?
“Building meaningful and relatable content is absolutely necessary for this digital age. It is a big component of what we do and what we want to be known for as a career website in this region. Doing so has helped us match many qualified candidates with our employer clients and has also provided local law firms with a new avenue to be recognised, and to build a targeted, online presence to showcase their strengths as employers.”
For more information about OfficeParrots, please see their website at: OfficeParrots.com, their blog or Mei Chel Tan’s LinkedIn profile or Twitter account.
