How one recruiter manages year-long attorney searches across multiple cities with Workable

Quick Results

Who Is Gould and Ratner

Gould and Ratner is a mid-sized law firm headquartered in Chicago with approximately 115 employees, including roughly 60 attorneys, spanning practices in real estate, corporate, litigation, and beyond. About 18 months ago, the firm expanded to Denver, growing that office from a single employee to seven. Managing every aspect of talent acquisition across both cities is Dan Minjock, Director of Talent Acquisition — a department of one responsible for roughly 20 hires per year, the majority of which are attorneys.

What Hiring Looked Like Before Workable

Attorney hiring operates on a different timeline and at a different level of precision than most recruiting. More than 75% of Gould and Ratner’s annual hires are for attorney roles, most commonly associates but occasionally partners. These positions demand 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 meaningful challenge. With no purpose-built system to document every interaction, preserve interview notes across rounds, and surface candidates from previous searches, a promising attorney encountered in one context could simply disappear from consideration. For a solo recruiter managing multiple active searches simultaneously — each involving up to five interview rounds across three separate days — the margin for disorganization was effectively zero.

Why Workable

Dan Minjock joined Gould and Ratner two years ago and adopted Workable from the start; the platform was new to the firm when he arrived. What he needed was a system capable of handling the complexity of legal recruiting without creating a burden for the senior attorneys who would need to use it alongside him.

Workable delivered on both counts. The visual pipeline gave him the organizational backbone that long-horizon searches require. The LinkedIn Recruiter integration eliminated 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 and Ratner

1. A Pipeline That Never Forgets

Legal recruiting operates on patience as much as process. A candidate for a specialized environmental law role might be the right person at the wrong time — unavailable for another year, or simply not yet ready for a move. Workable makes it possible to keep that candidate in the pipeline, document every interaction, and return to the relationship when the timing aligns.

Dan points to a concrete example: a candidate kept in the pipeline for more than a year was ultimately hired — a hire that was only possible because the firm maintained organized, detailed notes throughout. “We don’t ever wanna miss a great person,” he said. “And I think Workable makes sure that we don’t.” The same documentation capability allowed a second candidate to be moved seamlessly from one open search to a new one when a different role became a better fit, and that candidate is now a finalist.

“There’s no way the lawyers could remember what they interviewed the guy about a year ago if we didn’t document it.”

2. Stakeholder Collaboration That Actually Works

Each of Gould and Ratner’s practice areas is led by a practice chair: a senior attorney with deep investment in who joins their team. Getting those attorneys to engage consistently with a recruiting platform requires the interface to be genuinely intuitive — there is no room for a learning curve in a busy law firm.

All four practice chairs use Workable. They review candidate profiles, leave evaluations, and track pipeline stages without friction or complaint. The visual organization of Workable’s process flow, with clearly defined first-round and second-round stages, gives every collaborator the visibility they need. Dan’s summary of the adoption experience:

“So easy a lawyer can do it.”

3. Multi-City Hiring Without Added Complexity

When Gould and Ratner opened its Denver office, the team scaled quickly — but Dan’s recruiting infrastructure did not need to scale at all. Within Workable, opening a role in a new market is simply a matter of specifying the location: Chicago only, Denver only, or both. The platform handles the downstream complexity, including generating separate LinkedIn job posts for each market as LinkedIn’s structure requires.

What could have been a significant operational challenge became routine. The Denver expansion was absorbed into existing workflows without additional tools, additional headcount, or meaningful process change.

4. LinkedIn Integration That Simply Works

For a solo recruiter managing hard-to-fill roles, time lost to manual administrative tasks is time taken directly from candidate engagement. Workable’s LinkedIn Recruiter integration is one of Dan’s most relied-upon features — and he notes that it works every single time, without exception. Combined with simultaneous posting to multiple job boards, the integration recovers an estimated 5 hours per week that would otherwise disappear into administrative overhead.

5. Compliance, Candidate Experience, and Employer Brand

Workable’s documentation record has delivered meaningful protection in a compliance context as well. When outside agencies have attempted to claim placement fees for candidates already in Gould and Ratner’s pipeline, the firm has been able to demonstrate the prior relationship through Workable’s interaction history. The paper trail requires no extra effort to maintain — it is simply a byproduct of using the platform as intended.

On the candidate side, automated rejection emails have generated a response Dan did not fully anticipate: candidates routinely thank the firm for keeping them informed, even when they are not advancing. The Workable-built careers page goes live within seconds of a role being published, presenting a polished and professional experience that reinforces the firm’s reputation from the very first touchpoint.

Business Impact

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

“For the relative low investment of what it costs, it’s very high value for us.”