Sending an offer letter isn’t the end of your hiring process.
How you handle the offer conversation determines whether an attorney starts excited or already disgruntled. Get it wrong, and you’ll have a frustrated employee before they even begin.
Here’s how to get it right.
Schedule a Conversation, Don’t Just Send Documents
After the final interview, debrief with stakeholders. The hiring manager, your head of people operations, and key leadership team members need to validate the hire.
If you’re not absolutely certain, don’t move forward. By this point, you should know whether this person is right for the role.
Within a few days, make your decision. Then schedule a follow-up conversation to talk through what it looks like to take the next steps.
Don’t just email an offer letter. Schedule a meeting.
Treat It Like Closing a Sale
Hiring people is the same as sales.
When you’re closing a deal, your final meeting reviews the contract in person. You want to see facial expressions and understand where hesitations are as you go through terms and conditions.
The same is true with the offer letter.
Lock down expectations, timelines, and compensation. Give them space to ask questions and make sure you’re fully in agreement before moving forward.
Get Perspective From Your Team
Get feedback from multiple people in terms of how the team feels about the person coming in.
This matters especially for attorneys because they’re integrated in so many different ways. They’ll work with paralegals, other attorneys, intake staff, and leadership.
You’re building a culture, and you’ll either create a potential issue or reinforce what you’re trying to build based on team feedback.
Address Why They’re Leaving Their Current Firm
Find out early in the process why they’re leaving their current position.
Talk through how the pain they’re experiencing today gets addressed in this move. Whether that’s compensation, growth opportunity, or culture, reinforce how your firm solves those problems.
Ask them directly. For example, “You told us one of the things you’re really looking for is X. We’ve talked about how we address that. How do you feel like that’s going to be solved here?”
You want to hear them own the fact that they’re moving toward something they want. That helps them if they get a counteroffer.
Set Clear Timeline Expectations
You need an expectation of when this person starts.
It’s generally a good sign if someone currently employed gives substantial notice to their current employer. Two, three, or four weeks’ notice is reasonable. If they want to start in 30 days, that’s fine.
If they’re asking for 60 or 90 days, dig into whether something else is going on.
Also, uncover anything in that starting period that creates a hiccup in onboarding.
Big vacations planned. Surgeries scheduled. Anything they know about that affects their first 30 to 60 days.
You don’t want to start someone and then have them immediately out for two weeks.
Be Transparent About Compensation
It’s easy to start a team member with a bad taste in their mouth because you aggressively negotiated their salary.
If they’re running away from something painful and you’ve just given them a different version of that pain through aggressive negotiation, you’re setting yourself up for problems.
Be very transparent on your compensation model and expectations at different levels within your business.
Be clear about how compensation impacts salary and bonus potential, what the expectations are, what the timelines are to get there, and what happens if targets aren’t hit.
Watch their nonverbals as you present this. Maybe you posted a position at $120,000, and they’re negotiating for $160,000. You have a $40,000 gap to figure out.
If you’re transparent upfront about how the monetary part works and what the expectations are, the starting salary might not matter if there’s clear alignment on performance expectations.
For attorneys who have production-based compensation, be crystal clear on how revenue impacts overall compensation.
If that’s not clear, or tracking isn’t good, or reporting is ambiguous, you’re setting yourself up for a frustrating conversation that will feel like it’s coming out of nowhere.
How to Close Compensation Gaps
If there’s a small gap like $10,000, consider creating part of their salary as a sign-on bonus paid out over the first year of employment.
This works especially well for attorneys whose base compensation is based on production. If they don’t hit targets, there’s an easy adjustment when the sign-on bonus ends after year one.
If the gap is large, like $40,000, have a career conversation. Here’s where we are. This is how we think about responsibility. This is what would need to be achieved from a business perspective to get there.
Make it collaborative. How are they going to help the business grow so that that type of compensation becomes possible? If we don’t hit these objectives, what are the consequences?
Start This Conversation Early
If you get to the offer stage and haven’t started having compensation conversations already, you’re behind.
Ask about salary expectations in the culture interview. Not because you’re trying to figure out how to negotiate, but because you’re setting yourself up for a smooth offer conversation.
By the time you make an offer, you’ve already gone through three interviews.
You like this person. They fit a range you were okay with. Now you’re making that a real offer and explaining what that means.
Don’t Negotiate Just to Win
You might feel good that you won the negotiation and saved $10,000.
But you’re probably setting yourself up for resentment. Let them set their own expectations and then set very clear expectations of what that means in terms of performance.
You don’t want people to come in feeling disgruntled at the front end.
The offer letter meeting isn’t about getting the best deal. It’s about starting the relationship right, so someone joins excited about what they’re building with you rather than already feeling undervalued.
