If you recruit for top City law firms, banks, consultancies...

[Middleaugust]

...how important are A level grades and what would your minimum expectations be if a graduate candidate did not having any special circumstances such as illness or having attended a poorly-performing school?

Weird. So you would recruit from Cardiff, Liverpool and Birmingham (all decent but not as good as ....) but you wouldn't recruit from Bath or St Andrews or Lancaster which are WAY higher in the leagues and much harder to get into.

Bath isn't RG and yet all these recruiters in here saying they only recruit from RG are speaking bollocks.

Sometimes life takes you there by default. As a newly qualified I had skills that were suddenly needed and in short supply and I came across well so in I got to the top firm - despite one of my a levels being a C and being from a red brick Uni 😀

I've had applicant who only have maths and physics (or only biology/chemistry). nothing else.

I would expect at least a third, unrelated subject, and/or extra curricular activities to complement.

They're important. It's an easy way to whittle applicants down.

@greenacrylicpaint when you say only maths do you mean maths and further maths?

@partypant I don't think RG is as big as a 'thing' as it used to be. It's well known that there are a number of non-RG unis which are far superior particularly in some subject areas than RG unis. Bath is one. Lancaster is another of the top of my head.

In reality @partypant we basically only recruited from around 8-10 universities. We simply didn’t need to look further as we had so many applicants for so few places.
As for what was interesting - as people above said, anything really. We had an aerospace department so someone could show something relevant here, even things like interesting summer jobs, hobbies, shown leadership. Look it isn’t an ideal process but we tried to recruit interesting people, who also had good exam results.

To be fair I think often people say Russell Group but mean that "or equivalent" - top 15/20 universities.

So this all ends up being very self referential….one of the elements in university ranking is graduate prospects. If you only recruit from the top 20 then you are reinforcing their position in the rankings…

im interested in how you would handle someone with let’s say A+ A+ A but who
had gone to maybe somewhere around 50 in the ranking, and came out top of the class. Reason they went there not relevant. Would you look at them or does your screening rule them out on university?

So for us, probably yes, but please keep in mind that we were one last firm, recruiting only around 30 graduates. Bigger firms recruit so many more but we were almost in a perfect storm of being big enough to get a lot of great applicants, but not big enough to take a “chance” on an unknown quantity. Also, our firm really aimed to keep on everyone after they finished training so they needed to know that they would be able to cope with what was a pretty full on job. Basically if we had the choice of two great people, both excellent A Levels, both got a 2:1, both with interesting applications and we had to interview one, then honestly we would have chosen the one from Bristol rather than UWE.
But now days with blind recruiting I assume it’s different.

We only looked at 2:1 from Oxbridge or Russell Group, and we looked for good A levels. But this was literally everyone who applied to us - we would get 300+ applications for around 20 places

Same here for BigLaw. We received hundreds of applicants for every training contract, most of which had A’s at A-level. It’s an easy way to rule people in or out.

I take it @greenacrylicpaint doesn't recruit for an engineering consultancy!

@greenacrylicpaint I've had applicant who only have maths and physics (or only biology/chemistry). nothing else.

If they only had 2 a-levels even at a*, they wouldn't get into a top uni where typical applicants would have 3, 4 or even 5 a-levels

Law firm here.

We are much more conscious of social mobility considerations/ bias these days.

So once a candidate has their degree, we don't even ask for A Level results.

For qualified lawyer recruitment, we don't ask for name of university (but we do want to know grade and relevant subjects, which is often a bit of a giveaway).

But a dropped grade shouldn't matter, unless it affects your entire path.

@TheCuckoo so how does it work these days? Presumably you get a large percentage who have done law and there is obviously a difference between someone who has done law at Cambridge as opposed to law at (say) Oxford Brookes, so how do you pick the most qualified candidate for a position?
How do firms like Slaughter and May, who used to recruit almost solely from Oxbridge filter through their applications?
Im not saying they shouldn’t, it great to have social mobility but I’m just interested how the firms who really used to recruit the “best of the best” do this in practice these days?

The bigger firms do their own tests, i.e. several stages during the application process, i.e. psychometric tests, online aptitude tests, recorded interviews, online group tasks, etc.

They'll put a lot more emphasis on those tests during the application process than on A level subjects/grades which is probably just a very quick and simple check against whatever criteria they've imposed on the application which is mostly to check that the applicant has A levels in x subjects, at y grades or above, and including whatever is most relevant, which for finance jobs would probably be Maths - so as long as you've got your A* in A level maths, and 2 other A levels, that's the criteria met.

No individual person is sat wading through CVs in those bigger firms, it's all done by computer against pre-set criteria, so there'll be no one sat there thinking Fred is a better candidate because he did A level Maths and English against Bill whose not as good because he did less broad Maths and Physics!

@Badbadbunny I have worked in four international law firms and all application forms are reviewed manually in my experience. We used to have 5,000 applications for 100 vacation scheme places in one firm and we sat there day in day out reviewing forms.

Yes that makes sense - and I think we DID used to wade through CVs, I forget how much has changed. I wasn’t involved in that early stage, I was involved in the interview stage so I only know what I was told by HR.

i would presume if your eg magic circle etc, youll want the best of the best so to speak

The grandson of a friend did his law degree at Sunderland. He has now started a training contract at a Magic Circle firm. He’s very bright and I’m sure will do well. Where he did his degree is irrelevant.

@Ozgirl75 We used to recruit from Oxbridge only too with the very occasional exception. But we often found candidates mediocre in practice - having the traditional academic background didn't always make them the most practical or personable problem solvers.

So we tried a "blind" approach and are far happier with the results. The written narrative bit of the application form, plus the assessment day, becomes much more important. We get a more diverse mix in through the door. Clients are happier too.