Practice Management

Yahoo! News reports on another nutty research project about firm handshakes and handshake training bringing higher employability that week handshakes.  I like the term that people receiving "high handshake marks" rated most hireable.

The study, which appears in the September Journal of Applied Psychology, suggest that handshakes provide a glimpse of the real you.  In reality, handshakes provide a ready path to catching colds and the flu.  (Wash your had often).

The thing that really chaps me is that job seekers are "trained how to act in a job interview".  How to dress, to answer questions, how to look, and act and to shake hands.  Here is my advice.  Just relax and be yourself.  If the interviewer does not like you, then the hell with him or her.  Move on to some place that can or will more likely appreciate you for who you are.  What is the purpose of acting like somebody you are not?  If personality traits and differences really matter and you manage to fool the interviewer, then you are going to get fired or pushed out anyway.  There is a really good chance that you will not like working there because the person they hired is not the person you pretended to be.

It is often said that a jury can smell a phony a mile a way.  I can tell you that a lawyer recruiting for a law firm can sniff out a phony as well.

Also, "training" to reflect somebody that you are not is going to get you a job in a law firm that you will not like.  Let's say a Big Law firm likes how forceful you are, how firm and hard your handshake is, they like your backslapping abilities, your bull-shooting way, and how you can just cozy up just right on the edge of someone's comfort zone>  So, they put you in litigation when in fact you are reticent by nature and would be better suited for some kind of transactional work.  How long do you think you are going to last?  And, if you last, do you think you are going to be happy?

The same is true for marketing and networking as it is for employment.  People want to be remembered and treated half decently.  I have to admit that I am a backslapper and tend to have a strong enough grip.  I try not to hug ladies, and will touch cheek to cheek while shaking their hand if needed, but I do not want to be offensive.  That is not so much training as it is that I am uncomfortable doing it ... and, I have a tendency of eating onions for lunch (and kissing onions they are not).  But, the point is that you do not have to be somebody that you are not.  You just have to be there, and to be yourself.