5 callbacks would already be extraordinarily bad for a top student at HYSCCN. Top students at those schools get 15+ callbacks routinely. Yes, random chance leaves some room for unusually low conversion rates, but not a strike-out unless you only have a handful of callbacks to begin with. Unless there are some strange external circumstances around OP, it has to be interviewing skills that are the problem.LegalPerspective wrote:I have to disagree with what most people are saying here. It's not necessarily the interviewing that is torpedoing this student's offers. I am a seond year at a V10 NYC firm, and I've done tons of callback interviews. Afterwards we do evaluations and the recruiting department sends us little notes to let us know if someone has been given an offer or not been given an offer, so we know which candidates to follow up with later and woo. And remember, once you're doing callbacks at top firms, being HSCCN doesn't mean that much, because everyone interviewing is from a top school or has supertop grades.
In any event, just this past week I did 6 interviews. 4 were from NYU/Columbia, one from Yale and one from Duke. Three got offers (the Yale, obviously -we'll take anyone from yale, no matter what - and two from NYU). One NYU guy in particular, who didn't get an offer, was by a significant margin the best interviewee i'd ever spoken with, and had better grades than some people we give offers to. The Duke candidate (not offered) was also an extremely good interviewee and her experience and interests appeared to be a perfect fit for what she wanted to do at the firm (a field for which we are recruiting heavily). OF the 6, only one of the interviewees was kind of an interview dud, and he didn't get an offer.
I remember last year as well many of the people that I thought were great at interviewing did not get offers. I think sometimes it's just idiosyncratic - you generally meet 6 attorneys in a callback, including 2 or 3 partners, and maybe one important person was rubbed the wrong way by something, or reminded that person of a problem he'd had recently. It's impossible to tell. The only thing that you can really do is do TONS of callbacks in several cities, and make sure you don't tell people about it (the wide net casting, i mean). If this kid did like 5 callbacks, it's easily possible this candidate just by random chance didn't get an offer at any of them, especially since firms only give summer offers to between 1/3 to 2/3 of candidates they interview (depending on the firm). WHile it's unlikely to strike out at random like this, it's not impossible, and it's likely to happen to someone just given the odds. It might make us feel good to think that having good interview skills will mean this wouldn't happen to us, but that's just pretending to be more in control than we really are. But for the grace of God . . .
OP: Talk to OCS. Do a mock interview. Basically the advice already given.
This could also be it, especially if OP was focusing on especially insular markets (PacNW, Texas).Anonymous User wrote:Did OP by any chance bid almost exclusively on non NYC markets. I have friends at CCN and even H with top third and even top 15% grades who struck out in DC, Boston, and California.
