Attorney hiring for a two-city law firm, run by one recruiter on Workable

Quick Results

Who is Gould & Ratner?

Gould & Ratner is a mid-sized law firm headquartered in Chicago with approximately 100 employees, including roughly 55 attorneys, across practices in real estate, corporate, litigation, and more. About 18 months ago, the firm expanded to Denver, growing that office from a single employee to seven. Talent acquisition for both cities is handled by one person: Dan Minjock, Director of Talent Acquisition, who leads roughly 20 hires a year, most of them attorneys.

What Hiring Looked Like Before Workable

Attorney hiring runs on a different timeline and a different level of precision than most recruiting. About 75 percent or more of Gould & Ratner’s annual hires are attorney roles, most often associates and occasionally partners. These positions require a specific caliber, a specific area of practice expertise, and often a specific moment in a candidate’s career: a combination that can take well over a year to find.

Before Workable, keeping those long-running searches organized was a real challenge. Without a system built to document every interaction, preserve interview notes across rounds, and surface candidates from past searches, a strong attorney candidate encountered in one search could disappear from consideration entirely. For a solo recruiter managing up to five or six active searches at once, each involving as many as five interview rounds across three separate days, the margin for disorganization was effectively zero.

Why Workable?

Dan Minjock joined Gould & Ratner two years ago and adopted Workable from day one. The platform was new to the firm when he arrived, and he needed a system that could handle the complexity of legal recruiting without creating extra work for the senior attorneys who would use it alongside him.

Workable delivered on both fronts. The visual pipeline gave him the organizational structure that long, high-touch searches require. The LinkedIn Recruiter integration removed a significant source of manual administrative work. And the platform’s intuitive interface turned practice chair adoption from a potential obstacle into a non-issue.

How Workable Changed Hiring at Gould & Ratner

1. A Pipeline That Never Forgets

Legal recruiting runs on patience as much as process. A candidate for a specialized role might be the right person at the wrong time: unavailable for another year, or simply not ready to move yet. Workable lets Dan keep that candidate in the pipeline, document every interaction, and return to the relationship when the timing works.

One candidate stayed in Gould & Ratner’s pipeline for more than a year before being hired, a hire Dan says was only possible because the firm kept organized, detailed notes throughout.

“We don’t ever want to miss a great person. And I think Workable helps make sure that we don’t.”

The same record-keeping lets him pull up and cross-reference candidates from closed searches when a new, similar role opens, rather than starting from zero each time.

2. Stakeholder Collaboration That Actually Works

Each of Gould & Ratner’s practice areas, including real estate, corporate, and litigation, is led by a practice chair: a senior attorney with a direct stake in who joins their team. Getting attorneys to engage consistently with a recruiting platform takes an interface simple enough that a busy law firm with no patience for a learning curve can easily adopt.

All four practice chairs now use Workable alongside Dan. They review candidate profiles, leave notes, and track pipeline stages together, without friction or complaints. Dan treats the lack of complaints as a strong signal in itself, noting that he was the only one using the platform when he joined the firm. Today, every practice chair uses it with him as one team.

3. Multi-City Hiring Without Added Complexity

When Gould & Ratner opened its Denver office, the team scaled quickly, but Dan’s recruiting workflow didn’t have to change to keep up. Inside Workable, opening a role in a new market is a matter of setting the location: Chicago only, Denver only, or both. The platform handles the rest, including generating separate LinkedIn job posts for each market, since LinkedIn requires its own post per location even when Workable treats the role as a single job internally.

What could have been a significant operational lift became routine. The Denver expansion, which took the office from 1 employee to 7, was absorbed into Dan’s existing workflow with no additional tools, no additional headcount, and no meaningful change in process.

4. LinkedIn Integration That Saves Time

For a solo recruiter handling hard-to-fill roles, time lost to manual admin work is time taken directly from candidates. Workable’s LinkedIn Recruiter integration is one of the features Dan relies on most. Combined with automated candidate communications and simultaneous posting to multiple job boards, Dan estimates these efficiencies save him about 5 hours a week that would otherwise go to administrative overhead.

5. Protecting the Firm: Compliance and Candidate Experience

Workable’s documentation gives Dan a ready answer to a scenario he says hasn’t happened yet, but could: an outside agency claiming a placement fee for a candidate already in Gould & Ratner’s pipeline. If that ever came up, he could show, with a screenshot from Workable, that the firm had already been in contact with the candidate months earlier. The record requires no extra effort to maintain since it’s simply a byproduct of using the platform day to day.

On the candidate side, automated rejection emails have produced a response Dan didn’t expect: candidates regularly thank the firm for keeping them informed, even when they aren’t moving forward. Pushback is rare. Dan says fewer than ten candidates have argued with a decision in his two years at the firm, against hundreds of applicants who received the same notice. The Workable-built careers page goes live within seconds of a role being published, giving candidates a polished, professional first impression of the firm.

Business Impact

For a firm of Gould & Ratner’s size and complexity, Workable isn’t just a productivity tool. It’s the operational foundation that makes a one-person recruiting function possible. A single talent acquisition professional manages every hire across two cities, multiple practice areas, and searches that can stretch well beyond a year. That’s only possible with a platform that keeps every candidate organized, every stakeholder aligned, and every strong relationship within reach.

“For its relative low cost to us, it offers a very high value.”