The Complete Guide To Life After Hireback

Whether you landed your dream job, accepted a short-term contract or weren't hired back at all, here's how to succeed in the next stage of your career

The conventional wisdom about hireback season is that articling students have to accept one of two inevitable outcomes: to be hired back (and embark on an unstinting ascent to glory) or to be sent packing (and fade into professional oblivion). To put it plainly, that's a tragic oversimplification. For one thing, landing a plum associate position is no guarantee of enduring prosperity, nor is failing to get hired back a permanent curse on someone's ability to succeed. There's also a wide range of hireback scenarios—signing a short-term contract, deciding whether to accept a role on the document-review team, opting out of the process to escape a dreadful workplace—that occur quite often but tend to receive scant attention.