How Market Intelligence Changes the Job-Search Game
As Beard Strategies’ data expert, I help our consultants leverage a variety of data points to support our clients’ success. When it comes to career transitions, one of the tools I find most valuable is a proprietary market intelligence and job opportunity platform. It uses AI (and humans) to aggregate a wealth of legal industry information — some of it in near real-time. It’s the kind of market intel that gives attorneys a huge advantage in job searching, and I love using the platform to help our consultants offer unmatched outplacement support to our clients.
Supercharged networking
One of the most remarkable aspects of the platform is how it changes the game for networking. It allows me to pull up all kinds of connections: law school, undergrad, firm alums, and more.
For example, if an attorney at a firm wants to transition to an in-house role, I can find every alum from that firm who moved in-house and where they are now. The consultant and I then slice and dice the raw data, so we can get incredibly specific about geography, practice area and so on.
As a result, the attorney no longer has to rely on guesswork or spend hours searching LinkedIn for connections. Instead, their coach delivers targeted networking contacts that often turn out to be great matches. Our clients love it; they say it’s incredibly helpful to their networking efforts.
Right-sized client resources
Another benefit is the variety of output options the platform offers. Some clients who need networking support, for example, prefer to keep the output simple. In that case, the consultant and I will collaborate to develop a shortlist of high-value contacts.
For clients who like to roll up their sleeves and dive into data, however, consultants often ask me to create a custom spreadsheet of networking contacts. Working with their coach, the client can filter or sort the sheet to get all the details they want. The platform gives me tremendous flexibility in extracting the data, so I can tailor the spreadsheet to meet each individual attorney’s needs.
Fast open-position notifications
Another feature we use frequently is job announcement searches and notifications. Job postings are updated every 24 hours at minimum, and sometimes more quickly. And I can filter that data very specifically to pull only the most relevant postings for any given individual.
When I’m helping a consultant whose client is searching for a new role, we’ll set up custom alerts based on the attorney’s criteria. When new jobs are posted, I get an alert, and the consultant rushes the information to the client. That means our clients always have the freshest market intel, without having to comb through thousands of postings every day.
The platform pulls from a huge amount of publicly available information, so the real value is in bringing it all together in a targeted way based on an individual’s needs. It’s like that colleague who magically seems to know everyone in the industry, except the platform actually does know everyone — so our consultants can deliver the exact information clients need, right when they need it.
