Recruiting Summer Associates: Model Your Campaign After "The Apprentice"?

What's your model for hiring summer associates?  Are you satisfied with it?  If not, how about trying this instead:

• Model a challenge for them on the hit reality TV show "The Apprentice;"
• Schedule call-backs on the spot;
• Send "very senior" partners and only very senior partners to do the interviewing; and
• Create snappy marketing material describing your firm culture including, for example, a handout with a picture of a squashed tomatos headlined "Smash Bureaucracy."

I'm making this up, right?  Well, with the possible exception of April Fool's Day, we never make up stuff on "Adam Smith, Esq.," and this would be the actual approach of Greenberg-Traurig . 

Before you give in to the reflex to label this gimmicky, and a transparent effort to stand out from the gray-flannel crowd, think about the real business and financial acumen behind it.   Given that average associate turnover is 40% within the first two years, how could it be anything other than beneficial to let candidates know what your firm's culture is really like before they sign up to come on-board—and since Greenberg-Traurig is consistently described, both by its own partners, as well as consultants and observers, as "meritocratic" and "entrepreneurial," it's not stupid to let newcomers know that's the environment they're buying into.

This sums up the business case to be made for it:

Raffaele Murdocca, southeast regional managing director of BCG Attorney Search, a national recruiting firm, predicted that approaches like Greenberg's could become more common in coming years.
"Years ago, I would have said [law firms] don't market very well," Murdocca said. "They would just come on campus and you have to know who they are. There was no real branding. I think in a lot of cases, young students end up in law firms where they really didn't know what the culture was."

"Not really knowing what the culture was"—has this ever happened to you? And the result was...happy or unhappy?

Greenberg-Traurig, from my observation, "thinks differently" across the board, and their unconventional approach has taken them over the last decade from a nice regional Florida firm to #20 on the latest AmLaw 100.  The question then becomes, is the conventional wisdom working so well for your firm?