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Thursday, September 2, 2010 |
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A Message from Our Founder, Andrew Harrison Barnes ("Harrison")
Throughout my life I have seen a theme consistently express itself: research is power. I have seen this since my earliest days as a child, and the power of research has really changed my life and the lives of everyone I have come into contact with. Research can change your life too.
What to Do if You Are Alone Without Access to Information Several years ago I heard a famous author speak. He spoke about how he went to Princeton and Harvard Business School and then made millions of dollars. Then he spoke about how his father was a coal miner who beat him and how he got a scholarship and gave all the money he made away to charity. "What person do you like better?" he asked the audience. Everyone was more sympathetic to the person who faced human conditions like we all do—the coal miner's kid. I believe that understanding the story of Employment Research Institute requires that the core of my passion and our company's passion for research be humanized as well. I was raised primarily by a widowed mother who was very troubled throughout most of my childhood. I was also raised very much alone with hardly any emotional or financial support. In the span of a few years, most of my family on my mother's side met with a series of unbelievable tragedies. My mother was divorced, my stepsister was shot and killed while working in a fast food restaurant, my stepfather died of cancer, my mother's brother died in a crash of an ambulance helicopter he was flying, and on the day of his funeral, my sister found my mother's mother dead. These are the sorts of tragedies that can cause people tremendous stress—and my family was no different. We were poor after all these tragedies. There were several weeks we could not afford groceries. My mother essentially "checked out" emotionally for several years and disappeared after this series of tragedies. Not being supervised, I was injured several times in a series of fights, falls, and accidents that left my face and body scarred in many places. People called me "Scarface" while I was growing up. Moreover, I was a child of a single mother who grew up in an incredibly conservative city in the Midwest. Most parents did not let me play with their kids after school because I had no one to pick me up. I had no curfew, and I think a lot of people said bad things about my mom in my neighborhood. I love my mom dearly, and it was very hard for her in these years. Life was very hard on many levels. When I was nine years old, I lied to get a paper route because I needed money to eat. Probably to alleviate a lot of the stress she was feeling, my mom was rarely around. I never told the social services people about this stuff because I knew they would take me away. When you are growing up in conditions like this, you need to keep them secret from everyone—I was smart enough to realize this early on. I spent several weeks in a foster home once, and it was not fun. I am telling you all this because I want you to understand something very fundamental about me: I know what it is like to be alone and not feel like you have any support. If you have ever lost a job or looked for a job, you probably know what it is like to be alone too. When you are alone, you are scared. You want the answers, but there is no one to provide them to you. This is very scary. There are no guidebooks on how to deal with situations like the one I was in. In fact, I pretty much needed to understand all of this on my own. My Early Lessons in the Value of Research The only way I knew how to get out of the life I was in was to work like hell in school. I avoided drugs and most "fun" activities that my peers enjoyed. I studied a lot. I was extremely motivated because I knew that the only way my life would change was if I did it myself. Early on I believed I could not count on my family to support me. When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a 300-page report—and I kept excelling and doing everything I could to get better and better grades in school. This should give you some understanding of my level of motivation due to my situation. I ended up going to the University of Chicago for college and worked my rear off there too. I then went to the University of Virginia School of Law and did the same. I made the law review there, of course, because I am such a good researcher. I did everything within my power to escape the life I came from, and I did it all through the power of research. I could never get very good grades when I had to take a test, but if I had to research something, I'd always get an A. My junior year of college I got all As. I was almost a Rhodes Scholar. In my junior year of college, I wrote a 500-page research book about the social class stratifications in the neighborhood I grew up in. My professors were so impressed that I was asked to assist with teaching a class at the University of Chicago in my junior year. This sort of thing was unheard of. (I also wrote another 500-plus-page book in law school and was asked to co-teach a class.) I may have come from poor circumstances, but I did my best to research my way out of them. When I became a lawyer, I moved to California because I felt there was less of a class system there. Remember that I came from an environment that frowned upon me because of who others were, and I wanted to be seen for who I was. When I was practicing law as a young attorney, I had the privilege of working with some of the best attorneys in America. I think they must have seen how hungry and eager to please I was and wanted to work with me. The last attorney I worked for before I stopped practicing law was the best researcher I have ever known. He had never lost a case in a 30-plus-year career (and he worked on a lot of famous cases), and I never understood why until I had worked with him for about six months. For weeks and weeks I was assigned to do research and write briefs on points I felt were generally inconsequential and I knew that probably one in 10,000 attorneys would ever look at. I personally was beginning to wonder if this attorney was insane, but I actually enjoyed the research. For example, if a law said X, he'd investigate why it said X. He'd order 45-year-old transcripts of legislators arguing about passing the law, interview the legislators who passed the law, and just keep going. After weeks of working on one particular issue, I found something after weeks of careful nitpicking and research that completely turned a case in our favor even though before we had looked certain to lose. The other side ended up paying our client money to get out of the case. It always went like this with the attorney, and he always found something like this. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to find something that will turn everything in your favor. This is how this attorney won all his cases. This is also a secret that can change your life too. When I decided I no longer wanted to practice law in a law firm, I started speaking with recruiters in Los Angeles. To my surprise, out of the 15-plus recruiters I spoke with, I realized that they all knew of different openings, and no one knew of them all. None of these recruiters knew how to do research, and one of these recruiters I spoke to was ranked the top recruiter in the United States. Almost none of these recruiters knew how to write as well. They also spoke in vague generalities and generally seemed preoccupied with other things than the intense level of research I believed their jobs should require. This was amazing to me. I had worked for a federal judge and was working at one of the best firms in the world. I'd been all alone and working as hard as I could for more than 20 years. I felt that if my future came down to dealing with people like this, something was very wrong. I was amazed that the future of attorneys who had worked so hard and were so qualified came down to people who did not know the first thing about research. They might know about an opening, and they might not. This seemed crazy to me, and it made me angry inside. It made me feel like I had an injustice to fight. I felt that the people who worked so hard deserved to be taken care of. I'd wanted to be taken care of my whole life and never really had been. I knew that I could either continue to take care of myself or make a sea change and dedicate my life to caring for others. If you pick a bad attorney to represent you who does not know how to access the right information for you, the choice could be fatal. You could lose your house, your business, your freedom, or your life. Thousands of people make this mistake each day. I saw this when I worked for a federal judge. Some people could have avoided prison simply by knowing a piece of information their attorney did not argue. This was amazing to me. A good attorney (and his or her research) makes all the difference. The same goes for your career. If you do not have access to the right information, you are likely to have serious problems with your job search. Choose a poor recruiter, and he or she will not know of all the jobs out there. You will miss opportunities. Each of these opportunities could make a huge difference in the eventual outcomes of your life and your family members' lives. The Birth of BCG Attorney Search: A Research-Based Recruiting Firm I felt that it was a travesty that attorneys around the country were being served by people who knew so little about researching jobs. While not all legal recruiters are poor, I did feel that the substantial majority of them did not know how to do good research, how to use their research, and how to present their findings appropriately. In fact, most of the recruiters were salespeople. They simply called people and tried to get them to switch jobs. I decided to walk away from a career that had been years in the making in which I was making an incredible amount of money and start a recruiting firm. I knew nothing about recruiting, but I had faith in the power and enormity of what research means and can accomplish. I knew the company I was creating would change the lives of attorneys everywhere. I sat down at a table and started doing tons of research. I stored it all on an old PalmPilot because this was the only way I knew how to do so at first. Without going into too much detail, the practice of high-end legal recruiting is exceptionally complex. There are hundreds of firms in most cities. Each firm's openings need to be understood (and they change daily). In addition, most firms look for certain things in attorneys. Some firms may like attorneys who are nerdy, others good looking. Some firms are composed of heavy drinkers, some of cocaine users—others of people of certain religions and still others of homosexuals. Depending on the economy, firms want to hear different things. In a good economy, when firms have a lot of business, they want to hear that people are hard workers willing to go all out and work all the time. In a bad economy they want to hear how much business an attorney is likely to bring in. Then there are the attorneys seeking jobs. These attorneys also want different things—and all of this varies depending on the economy. The more you know about a law firm, the more you know who is likely to be a fit. The more you know about outside conditions in the economy, the more you know who is likely to be a fit. The more you know about the candidates you are serving, the more you know who is likely to be a fit. This is the genesis of what BCG Attorney Search does. The recruiters here are all intimately familiar with the legal market, and they understand their candidates and have backgrounds of stellar achievement so they can understand the people they are working with. Almost all BCG Attorney Search recruiters have worked in major law firms, and all undergo extensive training each year to stay fit and up on information about law firms. BCG Attorney Search ended up being the fastest-growing legal recruiting firm in history, and it is all because of researchers. Very few of our recruiters have ever picked up a phone to make a cold call. People come to them for their research and training. None of our recruiters has a sales background. Most were at the top of their class in college and worked at top law firms. Most also understand the value of research. No recruiter who does not understand research, the power of helping people, and how we can change people's lives ever remains at BCG Attorney Search very long. Our recruiters would not tolerate it. Today less than one in 100 applicants to be a recruiter at our company is ultimately extended an offer. We require applicants to take written psychological tests to understand their motivations. We all interview potential recruiters. We do everything in our power to bring only the most exceptional people in the world into our circle of recruiters. We take this so seriously because we know our recruiters are dealing with the futures of people we very much respect. BCG Attorney Search places a high percentage of the best attorneys in America each year, several earning well over $1 million per year. For people who want the highest level of service possible, BCG Attorney Search changes lives, and it delivers. When I started recruiting, I used to get teary eyed when I would place people in positions that because of the power of research (my research) gave them incredible opportunities I knew they never would have had without this research. Legal Authority The second Employment Research Institute company was Legal Authority. Not all law firms use recruiting firms; only the best ones do. If someone is a high-end attorney with a stellar pedigree, then a recruiting firm can make a tremendous difference. However, for most attorneys (and law students), a recruiting firm cannot be used. In late 2000 there were an incredible number of layoffs of attorneys around California and throughout the United States. I was seeing people who went to schools like Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, and others get laid off and have no options for jobs through recruiters in fields like corporate and telecom. This was not a reflection on them. It was the state of the economy. The work simply was not available. The problem with the legal profession, however, is that it is very subjective. For example, if an attorney is laid off, the next employer presumes that not everyone was laid off. Therefore, the employer reaches the conclusion that this particular attorney's work was not up to par. This can scar an attorney for a lifetime. It was a very serious problem to me. I saw these laid-off attorneys much as I saw myself—as children with no home and no one to take care of them. When a given practice area is not in demand, 99.5% of all firms will never pay a recruiter to find someone for them. The firms are too worried about paying the people they have that are there or hoping they will leave. In an area like Los Angeles County, there are more than 5,000 law firms; however, there are only about 300 law firms that use recruiters to fill their openings. There are even more companies out there that hire attorneys. I quickly realized that with research all of these attorneys (and others) could now reach a much larger demographic of employers. I also realized that if these attorneys were properly packaged (i.e., the law firms and other employers were told what they wanted to hear in letters and in resumes), then a potentially unlimited universe of employers would be available for these people to apply to. I started letting attorneys use the BCG Attorney Search database for free, and I printed resumes and cover letters for them to send out after editing them. The applications came directly from the attorneys and not from BCG Attorney Search (which would have implied a fee would be required). Legal Authority helps law students and attorneys package themselves and do mailings of their resumes and cover letters to employers. An attorney (we call them employment advocates) from Legal Authority first speaks with the attorney or law student seeking a job for about an hour and counsels the individual with information he or she needs to know for his or her search. We then recommend a subset of employers for the attorney or law student to speak with. We write our candidates' resumes and cover letters and then package these materials in professionally printed packages of (typically) hundreds of targeted letters for them to send to the employers of their choice in their preferred geographic areas. People are not applying for openings per se when they use Legal Authority—they are applying to employers in the hopes that they have openings. This process works, however. Most employers (like most attorneys) do not know how to market themselves. There are countless places a law firm can advertise—older attorneys may advertise in a staid, dying legal newspaper, the youngest ones (in this day and age) on a site like LinkedIn. The point is that Legal Authority helps attorneys market the heck out of themselves and find openings they would otherwise not know about. Outside of a recruiting firm like BCG Attorney Search, this is the most effective way for attorneys and law students to get jobs. I am aware of very few instances of people not getting interviews through Legal Authority. Legal Authority also grew exceptionally quickly. By the time Legal Authority was launched as a company, between Legal Authority and BCG Attorney Search, we had more than 40 researchers working seven days a week. While today we have more than 500, at the time this seemed like a very large number. LawCrossing Is Launched The Legal Authority database cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. I was passionate about this and lost money building this database. I literally had to pay researchers to research every single law firm in the United States. This was a huge task and very expensive. The Legal Authority database contains the contact information for every single American legal employer. We update this data four times per year. A couple of years into the process of building and refining this database, I quickly realized that most law firms, corporations, and government offices post their openings on their websites. I also realized that any openings I saw on commercial job sites could quickly be matched with the correct contacts in the Legal Authority database. Additionally, I knew that I could provide people access to this service that had jobs much more cheaply than I could provide a service like Legal Authority. Legal Authority costs a lot of money to provide. We are not only selling research; we are professionally writing resumes, doing printing, buying and storing paper, shipping packages, and so forth. LawCrossing was launched and within two weeks had three times as many legal jobs on it as any other job site in the world—we fired up the research engines. Today it has more than 25 times as many legal jobs as any other site. A significant percentage of attorneys and law students in the United States are members of the site, and last year it was the 72nd-fastest growing company in the United States according to Inc. magazine. People, especially attorneys, value research. Research makes all the difference. Whenever I get a little down, I review the thousands of testimonials on LawCrossing. I know the power of research. Research changes lives. I know it has changed my life and how I see and feel about the world. Resume Businesses As an outgrowth of LawCrossing and Legal Authority, a business specializing in resumes was launched shortly thereafter. Resumes are fundamental to any job search and require good research and writing ability. Our company Attorney Resume is the largest attorney resume company out there. Soon after launching Attorney Resume, we launched a company called ResumeApple. Student Loan Businesses In 2004 I consolidated my federal law school loans. I learned about a special program that could save me over $100,000 over the course of my loan repayment! It was astonishing to me that I could save so much money. I did not know anything about this program until someone I knew told me about it. At this point I was eight years out of law school. I knew that this was something that could help countless attorneys and law students, and after speaking with a student loan company at a trade show, I got into this business as well. We have saved attorneys over $1 billion in unnecessary interest through our company Law School Loans. We started off providing attorneys a research report showing how much they could save by taking advantage of the government program. Following the launch of Law School Loans, we launched a general student loan company to assist all students and recent graduates, EdFed. This company was enormously successful in 2006, and the income this generated gave me the personal courage to take the hope of research way beyond the attorney space and to the entire world. Research Branching into the General Career Space The success of EdFed led to the genesis of companies like Hound and EmploymentCrossing (comprising more than 30 LawCrossing-like portals to career information and jobs). By the end of 2007, EmploymentCrossing had reached over 500 researchers and other employees with offices throughout the United States and abroad. And our reach continues to grow. Today the EmploymentCrossing sites are gaining hundreds of new subscribers each week, and we are making the promise of research available to the entire world. We have never sold an ad on any EmploymentCrossing site, and we do not plan to. Conclusion Employment Research Institute is about research. Research has the power to change lives, and it can change the lives of everyone it comes into contact with. We do our research in the sectors we do because it provides the most value for society. We believe that helping people grow—including our employees—is fundamental to who we are. When research is done, people have the power to make good decisions. These decisions change the quality of their lives. Life is about the quality of the decisions you make. When you have good information, you make good decisions. Our sites exist to support people, and our companies exist to provide people with the information they need to make good decisions. |
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