Someone at your firm has said yes to a faculty evening, a guest lecture or a table at a student fair. Now the question is how a law firm should use social media around a job fair or recruitment event, because the event itself covers one afternoon and your firm's page can cover the weeks around it.
This post is written for a partner, an office manager or the junior associate who runs recruitment at a firm of 10 to 60 people in the Netherlands or Flanders. You have no marketing team. What follows is a routine we suggest, built from practice. We found no study showing that it brings more students to a stand, and we say so where it matters.
Recruiting law students takes a season, not a single post
Think of the academic year as one calendar with three kinds of post, each with an owner.
- One season post, written by you once. It lists every event you've committed to, with dates, places and the colleagues who'll be there.
- One live post per event, by whoever is there. It goes up while the event runs or just after.
- One recap per event, by the person who runs recruitment. It says what actually happened.
That's the whole model: one calendar post for the season, then a live post and a recap for each event. A firm with three events publishes seven posts in total.
An illustration, not a prescription: a firm might have a company day in the autumn, a recruitment lunch in the new year and an office visit in the spring. The season post names all three on day one. Each then gets its own live post and recap as it happens.
Why one calendar post and not one announcement per event
We aren't claiming a carousel gets more reach than a single image. The evidence we found is mixed, and we have no data of our own on it. The argument is practical.
A student can find every date in one place. Your colleagues have one post to reshare instead of several. And you write the announcement once, which matters when recruitment is one of five jobs you do.
If you build it as a PDF carousel, watch the caption. In our caption length report, PDF carousels engaged best with captions of 126 to 175 words. For layout ideas, see our guide to LinkedIn post formats for lawyers.
Which platform
Students may check you out before they come to your table, but we found no figures on how law students in either country use LinkedIn or Instagram. For scale only: DataReportal lists 14.0 million registered LinkedIn members in the Netherlands, and 6.20 million in Belgium. Those are registered members, not active users. Our post on the best social media platforms for law firms helps you choose, and the routine works on either.
On the day: the live post and a stand worth photographing
The season post promised a meeting. The live post shows it's happening, and it needs material, so decide beforehand who holds the phone.
Photograph people rather than materials. A partner explaining something to a student, a trainee laughing at the table, the queue. The Legal Top Talent Survey (2024 edition, 401 students) found that atmosphere and colleagues are the main drivers when students choose a firm. Real colleagues in the frame speak to that better than a logo does. More on this in our guide to social media best practices for employer branding.
A stand gives you more to photograph if it gives students something to do. This is what we'd aim for, not something we've measured. A contract with one deliberate flaw that students try to find with a marker. A whiteboard question about a recent ruling. Either gives a student a reason to linger and gives you a photo with a story.
Keep the live post short. One or two photos and a sentence on what's going on is enough, and it can go up from the table. You can write the longer account later, in the recap.
Three small things help the post work afterwards:
- Print a QR code that opens your LinkedIn or Instagram page on the notepads you hand out, so following you takes one scan.
- Use the event's hashtag if the organiser publishes one.
- Ask before you photograph or tag a student, and again before you post. If the answer is no, leave them out.
The recap: say what happened
After the event, the recap goes up with the photos you took. Its job is to be specific. "Thanks to everyone who came" gives a student nothing to remember or answer.
Write one thing only you could know. Which practice area drew the longest conversations. A question that surprised a partner. What a trainee told a student about their first month. Mention when students can meet you next, and tag the organiser if they'd want it.
A recap also has a second job. A student who lands on it should be able to find the rest of your season, so put a link to the calendar post in the first comment. That way the recap of one event points to the next.
Finding the events to put on your calendar
Student recruitment events usually come from a handful of organisers: faculty career teams, study associations and the occasional fair. We couldn't confirm a dated, firm-stand law fair for this season, so we name none, and the events below are examples of the kind to ask about.
Leiden's study association Grotius, for example, organises recruitment lunches, a company day and office visits at law firms, according to the faculty. In Leuven, the law students' association, the Koninklijk Vlaams Rechtsgenootschap (VRG), runs a job fair every academic year at the Brabanthal, and its page lists more than 115 offices. The last editions we found were held in late November, and we found no date for this year, so confirm with VRG before you plan.
The simplest way to fill your season post is to ask the associations at the faculties you recruit from which events they run, and to copy their dates and organisers into the post. The rest of the routine works the same wherever the event takes place.
What to do this month
You don't need to wait for the fairs to start. These three actions work before any event on your list.
- Write the season post. List every event you've said yes to, add the colleagues who'll attend, and publish it before the first one.
- Name a photographer for each event. One person takes the pictures, checks with students, and sends them to you that day.
- Draft the recap skeleton now. Write the tag list and the next date in advance, so afterwards you only add what happened.
If you'd like help running this, our coaching is built for firms without a marketing team. You write the drafts, your coach reviews them, and the final say on what goes out stays with you.
Start with the season post. The rest follows from it.