Most law schools don’t teach business development so not having a degree is not a handicap there. People learn business development the way you did by doing it or by getting special training from others with experience in it.

i would worry about applying to a company that does not consider applications from those without jobs. the search should focus on what the company wants and needs, rather than arbitrary rejection for a nearly irrelevant factor. [no jews, no blacks, no....] be direct in what you want rather than oblique in what you don’t want. after all, there are a million good reasons for not having a job. i know people who have been fired for honesty, who’ve resigned because of frightening sexual harassment, or who’ve had major philosophical differences when the character of a company changes. the only possible justification for a refusal to consider the not-currently-employed policy lies in currency of skills or customer base. and even then, workplace differences between a previous employer and the new one are usually far more important — will the new-hire fit? and if it were up to me, i’d out that company as quickly as possible. social networks can spread this information very quickly.

now you have to ask, why do companies do this? this practice probably arose from noting that the ratio of applications to acceptances for the employed was probably better than those for the non-employed. and so the employment consultants who look for correlations like this — and get paid handsomely for these peripheral observations that can be easily measured — claim victory and go home. the practice becomes part of HR lore, and it’s on to the next great data correlation. and it’s all so very very stupid. exclude for good reasons, not weak statistical correlations that are poorly understood.

shurtleff

ideally, you want somebody who has a specific set of clients with specific needs. the job-seeker should also understand that some recruiters, the clint eastwood type, work by simply having a fistful of resumes, go from one company to another, and say to the internal HR recruiter, pick one. they work by having that album of lots of people to fulfill any need. the bigger the album, the more likely the recruiter is to have a warm body that will fulfill minimum job requirements. this is usually not the best kind of headhunter for the jobseeker. however, if a company is hiring a lot of people in a hurry, they may strike gold with this type of recruiter. [otoh, the advent of monster.com and other specialized headhunting websites have tended to decimate the shotgun-resume recruiter because the hiring cost by internet is a tiny fraction of the recruiter's fee.].