How clerkship interviews are actually assessed
Clerkship interviews often feel like a conversation with no marking scheme behind it. What Allens, Ashurst Perkins Coie and MinterEllison publish about their own processes, and what a conversational interview is really doing.
By Archie Dimer
A common experience of clerkship interviews is that they do not feel like assessments. No behavioural questions, no scoring sheet in view, a partner and a senior associate having what feels like a conversation, and no way afterwards to tell what was being measured.
The firms publish more about this than most people realise, and what they publish shows that a conversational interview is usually still a structured one.
Three firms, three different processes
These are worth reading side by side, because the differences are large enough that advice written about one firm will mislead you about another.
Ashurst Perkins Coie runs a CV and academic transcript with short answer questions, then online assessments, then information events, then interviews with partners, lawyers and its early careers team. It describes its interview questions as competency based, giving insight into "the behaviours we value", and describes the interview as a "two way street" in which you are also assessing them.
MinterEllison publishes a six stage process: an online application with resume and academic results, open ended questions, a games based psychometric assessment of about ten minutes, a pre recorded video assessment of about twenty minutes, interviews, then networking events. It says the interview assesses "your key competencies, technical skills and a bit more about who you are and what you stand for", and asks about teamwork, interpersonal ability and business acumen. It also asks candidates for three interesting things about themselves that are not on the CV.
Allens uses a strengths based assessment built with Linklaters and Cappfinity before interviews. The number of interview rounds depends on the city: one face to face interview in Brisbane and Melbourne, two rounds in Perth and Sydney. Candidates are told who their interviewers will be beforehand, subject to late changes. Before interviews there is an event called Allens Insider Access, held in every state, where candidates meet the firm's people and are introduced to a junior lawyer acting as a buddy.
What a conversational interview is doing
Two of these three firms describe their interviews in the language of competencies and behaviours. That is a specific thing. A competency based interview has a defined list of qualities, and the interviewer is listening for evidence of each one, whether or not the questions announce themselves as assessment.
This is why an interview can feel like a chat and still be scored. The question about your part time job is not small talk if teamwork and client handling are on the list. The question about a subject you enjoyed is not small talk if the list includes commercial awareness or motivation. The absence of "tell us about a time when" does not mean the absence of a rubric behind the desk. It usually means an interviewer confident enough to get the same evidence without the formula.
Two practical consequences follow. Answers that contain a specific situation and what you actually did are worth more than answers that describe your general qualities, because the first is evidence and the second is assertion. And an answer that never leaves the abstract gives a competency based interviewer nothing to record.
The parts that are genuinely not assessment
The clerkship evening events are described by the firms themselves as opportunities to learn about the firm and meet people, and Allens explicitly attaches a junior lawyer to candidates as a buddy. Treating those events as a covert assessment is a common mistake and it makes people worse at them.
The honest caveat is that they are not sealed off from the process either. People form impressions and the firm is a workplace where those impressions travel. That is a reason to be normal, not a reason to perform.
The "two way street" framing in Ashurst Perkins Coie's material is worth taking at face value for a practical reason rather than a sentimental one. You will spend the clerkship in a specific office with specific people, and the interview is one of very few chances to find out what that is like before you commit to it.
What nobody publishes
No firm publishes its competency list, the weighting between interview and transcript, or the scoring scale. So the common question of whether a strong interview can rescue a middling transcript has no published answer, and anyone who gives you a confident one is guessing.
What can be said is that the transcript is used earlier in the process than the interview, at a stage where it functions as a filter, and that the interview only happens to candidates who have already passed that filter. That ordering is visible in all three processes above. It does not tell you the weighting, but it does tell you the sequence.
For what the transcript does before you get to this point, see what firms actually weigh. The online assessments that sit between the application and the interview are a separate stage with their own logic, and each of the three firms above runs a different one.