LiteraTV Episode: Lawyers Leading in Social Change

Mary Ellen Connerty, O’Melveny’s director of diversity and engagement, participated in LiteraTV episode “Lawyers Leading in Social Change” to discuss how Pymetrics supports diversity in the firm’s hiring process for its summer program. 

“O’Melveny really prides itself on its culture,” Connerty said, which includes “elements of collegiality, real growth mindset,” and “an inclusive environment where everybody feels they can belong.” Connerty told LiteraTV, “summer classes are our future attorneys” and “Pymetrics fosters where we want to go.”  

Pymetrics is a game-based recruiting tool specifically designed to evaluate a candidate’s social, cognitive, and behavioral features—such as attention, planning, flexibility, and memory—producing unbiased data that can be measured against existing successful employees to gage their compatibility and potential for success within the firm.

“We really wanted to add an objective point with the right assessment that would allow us to assess characteristics that have a higher predictive validity that would come through certain cognitive traits because we understood that the cognitive pieces would have the higher predictive,” Connerty shared with LiteraTV. The additional data point, Connerty added, helps “counter the implicit bias in the old school approach to recruiting and increase the diversity of our callbacks and acceptances.”