It's time for the AALS to bring back the Faculty Recruitment Conference

The Association of American Law Schools’ annual Faculty Recruitment Conference—sometimes the “Meet Market” (or “Meat Market”)—was a longstanding complaint among legal academics. It took place at a now-demolished hotel in Washington, DC, known for its “towers” across the complex and challenging means for interviewees to race from interview to interview. It was an expensive endeavor for everyone involved. It was a draining experience. Covid disrupted the status quo—now, screening interviews could take place leisurely, over Zoom, with less cost and more flexibility.

But… it’s time to bring the FRC back.

I’ve run appointments on both sides of Covid, and I’ve seen the appointments process play out several times on both sides of it, too. There are major costs to the absence of the FRC.

Let’s start with how the process works for candidates now.

AALS sends out the Faculty Appointments Register to interested law schools in mid-August. Schools review candidates, then extend invitations to candidates to interview. Because of time zones, windows of opportunity may reasonably range from 5 am Pacific, to 9 pm Eastern, depending on one’s time zone. Suppose you secure an interview at 10 am on a Tuesday. You might need to cancel or move a class if you are currently teaching, or you might need to block out time on your work calendar. A 30-minute screening interview probably needs more than 30-minute block from you. You are preparing for that interview well before the interview—perhaps an hour before, and perhaps the night before. The brief screening interview becomes a fairly sprawling episode. And suppose your next interview is 9 am Friday. You do it all again a couple of days later.

These are early schools, calling in September. And one of them asks you to visit for a callback in late September. Great! But you still have screeners to juggle, one this week, another the next week. It’s possible that some schools are extending offers in mid-October—while others are still scheduling screening interviews. It becomes challenging to juggle a very drawn-out screening process over three months, in conjunction with offers extended and questions about timing of those offers in relation to other stages of the process. Candidates have no real knowledge of what a “normal” timeline is or how schools are behaving except by anecdote or rumor.

For law schools, it is likewise a drawn-out process, as rarely do schools schedule all interviews on a single day but have to stretch it out. That makes it more challenge to compare candidates head to head when they are taking place over a longer period of time. Likewise, it makes it a challenge to coordinate around candidates given time zones or the erratic nature of callback interviews.

(There are other soft advantages, too, like in-person interviews being a somewhat more meaningful way of interacting with a candidate, but I’ll put that to the side. There are other advantages I find better, like the informal conversations among candidates at receptions during the interview process, which I found very rewarding both as a candidate and as an interviewer, but I know that can be a high cost that is less appreciated.)

To me, this process is now needlessly prolonged and draining. The purported “efficiencies” from having a virtual set of screening interviews on an irregular timeline have not yielded the promised payoff. (As an addendum, it is not unlike some of the deficiencies in the law school clerkship hiring market, when federal judges went “off-plan” resulting in a dramatic reduction of information for candidates and a much longer window for hiring, rather than a limited couple of weeks with ample opportunities for comparison and for information for students; or the on-campus interview process for law firms, which now get ever-earlier with virtual screening interviews in an ever-sprawling timeline, rather than a condense fall 2L semester of comparison and information for students.)

I understand that returning to the FRC is a costly endeavor. But it should also help both candidates and faculty compress the “pain,” if you will, to a couple of days, with better comparisons of candidates, a more consistent timeline, and some of those other soft advantages.

I also know that no one can “force” schools to attend AALS. But it would be nice to see—even as simply as an AALS survey to hiring chairs!—if a critical mass of schools were interested in attending a scaled-down version of the FRC. It would not preclude schools from using Zoom interviews, either exclusively or to supplement in-person recruiting (e.g., for candidates with too few interviews to make the FRC trip economically feasible or with other commitments).

If the FRC were moved up to early October or late September—in the past, it was often mid- to late-October—it would also help the trend from schools to move hiring earlier when possible.

Professor Brian Leiter (no fan of the FRC!) offers some thoughts on the generalized trends in hiring here. It does seem quite spread out, and there is certainly a lack of information (see Professor Paul Horwitz’s comment) for candidates.

I’m sure there will be opponents to the FRC and prefer the status quo. That’s fine, but I just close with two reflections. The first is that while the FRC might be better for (some!) law school faculty, I’m not sure it’s better for (some!) candidates, and it’s worth reflecting on those tradeoffs in a meaningful way. The second is that a return to the FRC does not preclude some remote interview opportunities—even opponents might admit that the flexibility to format, in-person and remote, might allow different schools and candidates express different preferences in a way that (largely!) suits everyone. (The timeline is not mandatory, of course, to assuage any “antitrust” concerns; it is simply a coordinated and convenient activity run by the AALS for law schools.)