How to Access the Best Candidates and Keep Them Informed

Summary: Applicant and candidate management is necessary for law firms to find the best candidates and keep them “warm” throughout the hiring process.

• Law firms that don’t respond to applicants may risk their own reputations.
• Not keeping candidates engaged during the process is a sure way to lose A-list prospects.
• Many steps along the hiring pipeline can be automated, and others can be made more efficient and practical with HiringPartner’s tools.
• With our available suite of ATS tools, and through microsite and website integration, there’s no longer an excuse for poor applicant management.

Applicant Management: How to keep your potential hires warm and informed

Good candidates become good lawyers. Good lawyers make great law firms. Cue images of HR and partners cavorting in tall grass with butterflies and bluebirds.
If it were only so simple: Whether a hire becomes an eventual asset or liability will depend largely on how you recruited them. The hiring process at law firms can force big expenditures of both time and money. Getting it wrong will dig your firm into a deep hole that will take years to get out of.

To help ensure law firms get butterflies and bluebirds and not deep holes, HiringPartner offers users a suite of leading edge technologies and features that no other legal recruiting site or job board offers.

And all is offered absolutely free.

HiringPartner is a freemium service that can save your firm thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in hiring costs and incalculable value for helping your find the best candidates. Our proprietary, state-of-the-art ATS will allows you to find the top talent, from job post to job offer—for as many legal jobs as you want, as many times as you want, for as long as you want.

Here’s why your law firm needs HiringPartner:

What your hiring looks like vs. what it should look like

1. The Wrong Way: You place an ad; many respond—maybe hundreds. You’re buried under an avalanche of email. It doesn’t stop until the ad is no longer active.
   The HiringPartner Way: Using our ATS, your avalanche stays out of your email account completely. Your workflow remains undisturbed. All applicants will be held within our portal—categorized, collated, and easy to assess quickly. You can choose to receive email notifications at your pleasure on a schedule of your choice—be it per applicant, daily, or weekly.
2. The Wrong Way: You cull through a torrent of applicants while meticulously screening the individual email responses—all the more difficult if you’re juggling multiple jobs in your hiring pipeline. Then, you send your most noteworthy candidate choices to the others in your hiring funnel. You await their reactions before taking the next step. If you’re not in agreement, you go back to #1.
   The HiringPartner Way: Through our portal, you can have many job postings going at the same time. Each will have its own page accessible by tab. From here you can find a candidate’s résumé, cover letter, work history, practice area, and other credentials. Your team members can add notes and responses on each candidate’s file to be accessible to the hiring team—throughout the pipeline and all along the process.
3. The Wrong Way: Send emails to set up screenings, interviews, and rejections as needed. More check-ins with your hiring team.
   The HiringPartner Way: We make your process much more efficient by automating many of the usual hiring tasks. From your portal you can set up and send out notifications when applications are received, you can schedule interviews—and enter all information on interviews to be shared—and send out rejections.
4. The Wrong Way: During this overlong process, candidates that once thought they were contenders will begin to lose interest after they’ve heard nothing for a week or two. The best of them will have since found other law firms with speedier processes that are more engaged with their prospects.
   The HiringPartner Way: Manage candidates throughout the process: schedule status emails for those still in the pipeline and allow them to know that they’re still active and under consideration. Your interest keeps them interested. This will help keep you from losing your best candidates to an often drawn-out process.
5. The Wrong Way: Maybe your firm realized it was holding out for unicorn candidates. For a time your hiring team couldn’t reach an agreement but has now decided on a few in your pipeline that were already interviewed. All agree that one may actually work out after all. But now your positions have been open for a couple, a few, or even many months. Your team decides on a candidate that applied early in the process. You go back through your flood of emails to locate that candidate and make them an offer.
   The HiringPartner Way: All your candidates and their information are now in one place. Your process is optimally streamlined. Our system can incorporate multiple offices, locations, departments, job types, practice areas, and microdata that were previously unavailable to you. You can also sort your candidates by law school, year of graduation, current firm, and other metrics.
6. The Wrong Way: Turns out in the meantime, that candidate had interest from other firms. One or more had already made them an offer. Maybe they would’ve preferred your firm but they had no idea of their status with you. They weren’t kept updated and are now long gone.
   The HiringPartner Way: We provide your firm with a one-stop processing center that keeps your candidates and jobs easily searchable and quickly accessible. If you’ve passed over a candidate but may want to keep them in your archive for an upcoming position, that’s now possible. At last your firm can have the Applicant and Candidate Management tools it needs and deserves.

Efficiency is not an option. You need to streamline and optimize your hiring process now.

Dragging out your hiring process does not improve the quality of hires—it actually reduces it.

This is because the best candidates don’t stay on the job market for long. According to this research, the best of them can be gone in as little as 10 days. The duration of your process should take no more than two to three weeks tops. However good you believe your law firm to be, your firm is most likely not the only stop on their wider search. They could be in communication with your competitors; and when your competitors acquire the best candidates, it’ll be a double loss for you. And this: When your A-listers have timed out of your too-slow process, your choices will be B- and C-listers.

Don’t “manage” your candidates properly and you lose the race. It’s that simple.

Recommendation: Have your firm make and stick to a “Hire-by-date.” When an A-list prospect is identified, act quickly. You should immediately estimate how many days they will likely remain available. Set up automated reminders on your calendar to remind you.

How to create a hiring process worthy of your firm

HiringPartner can give your firm the Applicant and Candidate Management tools you need—and deserve:

Why your law firm may needs HiringPartner—now

• More than Applicant Management, it’s also Reputation Insurance: The #1 complaint from job seekers is not receiving feedback from the firms they apply to. If on average, your every job posting receives 250 résumés, that’s an unruly workload to handle without the automation and software tools HiringPartner can provide—at no cost.
• Most applicants claim they never hear anything from prospective employers—77% according to a poll. This negligence can leave candidates with a negative feeling about your entire organization; 90% said they would’ve felt better had they gotten any sort of feedback in the application process; as a result, 72% came away from the experience feeling that the unresponsive organization was untrustworthy and not worth recommending, not just as an employer but as a product or service provider. Applicants feel entitled to a response. They’ve gone through the process of applying; they feel they’ve earned it.
• As the process of finding a job now takes longer than it ever has, especially for jobs paying over six figures, there’s even more time that applicants will need your firm to remind them that they are still considered active.
• To not communicate with applicants, and even more—candidates, can have real consequences: It can hurt your firm’s brand, its image, and taint your reputation as an employer for future candidates. With so many resources now available for disgruntled applicants to post their gripes, their disappointments can become very visible. This can be true whether your firm has a few applicants or a few thousand. And there is much more than your current job offerings at stake. Damage to your firm’s reputation could make you a pariah to future candidates for years to come.

HiringPartner provides your firm with all the necessary tools needed for providing candidate engagement that is efficient, thorough, and completely automated. We also provide concierge-level customer support that is not automated. When you call, a person will answer. And—to say it again—all of this is absolutely free.

Microsite hosting: A HiringPartner exclusive

We can create a microsite for you where candidates responding to your ads can be directed to information about your firm’s information. There, they can learn more about your firm, the position offered, and any other information you choose to offer. This microsite can integrated with you firm’s website or you can even use your firm’s website as the access point. This way you can use our tools on the back end giving you access to all that HiringPartner offers while presenting the face and brand of your firm through your own website.

And again: At no cost to you.

No excuses for bad practice

With an applicant management system like HiringPartner’s, you can control every aspect of your hiring process and give all of your applicants the attention they demand. There’s simply no longer an excuse for not getting it done. Our software system provides you with efficiencies, options, data access, and insights you’ve never had access to before: Good communication and candidate management become easy and highly automated practices.

HiringPartner posts your jobs on over 100 job boards in one step and delivers all your results efficiently to one portal. You can set your own parameters for accessing the latest in search standards. This can be especially helpful with returning candidates. You can search for data and track 100% of your candidate applications from one source. Data is pulled from your ATS to eliminate the need for copying and pasting between systems, increasing data accuracy while saving time.

What HiringPartner means for your firm:
You’ll always hire the best candidates possible.

About Harrison Barnes

Harrison Barnes is the founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in job searches and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company, LawCrossing, has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.

About HiringPartner

HiringPartner is a data-driven recruiting and applicant tracking system. Hiring Partner delivers the intuitive, integrated management tool you need, while maximizing your attraction of top talent through our exclusive network.

There are many job boards, applicant tracking systems, and ways to recruit law firm attorneys out there—but there is only one Hiring Partner. Hiring Partner is the most powerful legal recruiting tool ever for law firms. In other words, Hiring Partner is not just an organizational tool, but also a talent magnet. For more information, please visit https://www.hiringpartner.com/