“There’s no school for recruiting,” Alisa Levin said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. “You learn on the job. A lot of the skills I learned through successful fundraising when I was involved — and I still am — in many community organizations.

“You have to understand the product that you’re pitching. You have to understand what motivates the candidate or the donor. You have to be relationship-driven. It’s called development because it takes time,” said Levin, a founding partner of Greene-Levin-Snyder LLC, a New York-based legal recruiting firm.

Levin has developed clients through her work with nonprofit organizations, including the UJA-Federation of New York. “I can name about five partners that I’ve met through the lawyers’ division there,” she said. “When I’m cold-calling, which is not the most fun thing to do, if people know me from a different context, it really helps.”

Levin also discussed what makes law firms successful at lateral hiring and how increased lateral movement among law firm partners has created its own demand. “For the most part, firms want to be one-stop shops and be global, and so the people who are leaving need to be replaced,” she said. “It’s musical chairs. I don’t see the music stopping.”

Check out the podcast with Alisa Levin below:

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