The 4-Step Law Firm Resume Screening Process That Filters 50% of Applicants Fast

Stop drowning in 200+ applications. This framework defines your criteria, leverages AI, and gets your team screening without you.

Here's the 4-step system we built to filter 50% of applicants quickly. We break down the exact law firm hiring process we use: criteria definition, tech filtering, red flag hunting, and strategic reference checks. 

We even talk through using ChatGPT as your applicant tracking system if you don't have one yet. Plus, I dropped my reference check strategy that completely changed how we vet candidates. Real recruitment tips that scale.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Law Firm Resume Screening: Stop Wandering Into the Process 

1:49 - Define Your Screening Criteria Before a Single Application Hits 

2:26 - The 50% Rule: Eliminating Applicants Who Don't Pass the Sniff Test 

3:38 - The Apprenticeship Square: Training Your Team to Screen for You 

5:10 - Using AI and Applicant Tracking Systems to Batch Process 

6:20 - How to Train a ChatGPT Agent When You Don't Have Full ATS 

17:25 - Resume Red Flags: Job Hopping, Bad Formatting, and Applying Up 

19:25 - The Reference Hack: Asking for Specific Supervisors by Name 

21:58 - Disqualify Don't Qualify: The Mindset Shift That Saves Hours

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Tell me in the comments if you liked this podcast and w...

Chapters

• 0:00 Law Firm Resume Screening: Stop Wandering Into the Process
• 1:49 Define Your Screening Criteria Before a Single Application Hits
• 2:26 The 50% Rule: Eliminating Applicants Who Don't Pass the Sniff Test
• 3:38 The Apprenticeship Square: Training Your Team to Screen for You
• 5:10 Using AI and Applicant Tracking Systems to Batch Process
• 6:20 How to Train a ChatGPT Agent When You Don't Have Full ATS
• 17:25 Resume Red Flags: Job Hopping, Bad Formatting, and Applying Up
• 19:25 The Reference Hack: Asking for Specific Supervisors by Name
• 21:58 Disqualify Don't Qualify: The Mindset Shift That Saves Hours

Transcript

0:00

leverage technology to find efficiencies in the front end of the process so that you can spend the time going through and doing what actually matters, so that you make sure you're finding a great fit. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family law attorneys build the firm of their dreams. I'm your host Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our family law firm only marketing agency called Rocket Clicks that was actually born out of our own family law firm, Sterling Lawyers, that has grown to over 27 attorneys. Today we are continuing our series on hiring or focusing on resume screening. We have our co-host, Anthony Karls, who is also the co-founder of Sterling Lawyers, as well as our head of operations at JP VanderLinen, with us to talk through best practices when it comes to sifting through and reading all of those resumes that you get when you post a new job. All right, gentlemen, we are back continuing our hiring series. And what we know is that there are 1,000,001 ways to submit your application for a job across the internet, and that we are all inundated with hundreds, if not thousands of resumes within our firms and our businesses. And so today, we want to talk through the best practices for screening resumes and ensuring that you have the right talent. JP, we have a nice list of things that we're going to review today. The first one being the screening criteria. How are we going to evaluate the resumes that are coming in? Tell us about, what we do, at our law firm as well as here at Rocket Flex. Yeah. So the first thing that I'll say is, what we're not going to do is we're not just going to throw a job, post up and then have resumes start coming and go, I don't know who do we like, who's who's fault do we like, what's the layout like? We're not going to do that. We're not going to wander in. We're going to set a plan up front. What are we looking for? What's most important to us? What do we need to screen out and not screen out? And it seems simple, but literally just defining what success criteria are for someone's application is, is incredibly important. And so you need to know specifically based on the role you're recruiting for, like what are the non-negotiables. Because this is what you should do. This first round, this resume screening, this is all about getting rid of the 50% or so of applicants who come in, who just don't pass the sniff test, like you don't want to waste time going further and going to the next steps. You just want to cut them out here. And so, Tony, I know at the law firm we've got a bunch of different roles that we recruit for, and, and, who's typically involved in that process with, we're setting the tone for those. So, depends on the role that we typically like to work with. Kind of the managers of the position. So, like, when we built this out for attorneys, we're very much involving our two managing partners there in terms of how they're how they're screening these people at the front end, determining what the criteria is or the HR team can execute that. Well, same thing on the paralegal front. So our our lead paralegal, she's the one that helps helps draft that sales side. Same same story. And really it's, what are we what are we looking for? And it's more of an educational session with that HR person who we're really trying to write down. Here's exactly what we're looking for. If it's new, new to that individual, whether, you know, whether it is an actual HR journalist or recruiter or you're just using an admin, like what I would recommend doing is taking a batch of resumes and going through it with that person doing a live recording. So it's really clear, like this one's good. Oh, did you see? Do you see this? This is something that I try to avoid. Or here's some words that are used that typically indicate that they're applying up for a job, and they're not actually at the level of the role we're trying to hire for. So like there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do as a business owner to sit down so that you don't have to do all the resume screening and teach that person that is doing it for you what to look for and how to do that. And I would just, you know, run them through an apprenticeship square. Show them how to do it. Have them help you do it. Have you know or have them watch you do it. Have them help you do it. You help them do it. And then you watch them do it. Just kind of like let them go through that process and they'll they'll really quickly, if you go through 20 resumes, they'll probably have 80 to 90% of what you're looking for. Dial them pretty quick, but you just put that upfront investment in. Yeah. To me, it sounds like it's taking the time on the front end to create a very clear picture of who's the ideal candidate. What qualifications do they have? What are we looking for specifically on these resumes so that we can sift through them quicker? So right. Yep. 100%. Right. And, we've been known to find a process or build a tool for this. Yeah. Our second point is using technology to filter out these resumes. Tell us more about that. Yeah. So obviously, a lot of the acts that are out there, applicant tracking systems today have started to implement AI or other tools in that'll help you with this resume screening. And so again, if you've defined your criteria well, you can batch process a lot of this and get support from technology to quickly identify resumes that have red flags on them or don't have key, items that you're looking for, whether it's experience, education, previous role titles. There's all kinds of things you can look for on there. But really the point here is just to move through the stages as quickly as possible. Now, I will say that as you're rolling this out, spend time validating the technology. So make sure that you're not missing out on good potential candidates, because the AI is learning or because you didn't put a criterion correctly. So definitely validate while you're getting it in place, or once it's up and running, can certainly help your team screen through faster. Any any specific technology or arts we prefer? I would say most of our firms that we're going to be working with, they probably don't have a full system yet. So I would really, I'd really encourage our, our listeners who don't have one to, to leverage something like ChatGPT and train an agent to, to screen these, to screen their resumes for you. Because the more quickly you can go through them and identify for, you know, ChatGPT. And we've built several, several agents like this for leveraging internally. You just dump a resume right in right in there and it will score it for you. And as long as you understand, like how the scoring system works, that you've set up, it's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and then you'll have your edge cases that are like, you know, if you're doing it on a scale of 1 to 10, your edge cases would probably be sixes and sevens. You're going to want to manually review those, and that's how you're going to want to move these things forward. So just like leveraging leveraging technology to identify the, the scoring, I think would be a good, good place to start. And it's, it's as simple as just using ChatGPT, and taking your resume and dumping them in there. What kind of efficiencies are we talking about here? Like, if you if you get a thousand resumes and you run through this process, are you then reviewing, like, you know, 30, like how how much efficiency does does leveraging technology really give you? I would say that your ability to screen through a large volume of applications, call it, that's just using a sample size of 100. You could screen a hundred resumes easily in 30 minutes and get that down to probably the 10 or 15 that actually meet your criteria. So it'll go really fast. You have to do the work upfront. And what I would you know, I'd encourage people to leverage Upwork and write out exactly what you're looking for so that you can work with someone that maybe you don't know how to write. Right. Chat agents right now. So, like, leverage someone on Upwork. There's a lot of people that do this. It's not super expensive. You can very easily access it. All you need is a ChatGPT G account, create an agent and then you're just going to you're going to test and validate. You're going to dump a bunch of resumes and see how it scores it. Give it a good one, give it a bad one. See how it, see how it scores it. And then start utilizing testing and iterating. And it's for improvement. So it doesn't have to be complicated. I would that's what I would say. This is very accessible to anybody that knows how to use a computer. Like, yeah, those are real efficiency gains. Right. That's going to really help you find the right candidate quickly. Yeah. If you think about screening 100 resumes manually, each one you. Yeah, each one you're probably looking at for it. You know, best case scenario, probably three minutes. So you know, that's that's 300 minutes. It's a couple hours. And like you got a lot of things to do versus like let's dump them in. Let's review them. Let's see if they meet our criteria, the experience that we're looking for. And then use use your three hours to do the follow up. Start getting these scheduled so that you can get get that position filled. Do you want to grow your law firm, but you can't predict next month's revenue. Do you hire an attorney without knowing if you can actually afford it? I hear you. We have a planning system that forces us to focus. It's built on these three key principles. We are teaching this entire framework in a free 45 minute webinar called the 2026 Annual Planning Live. Let's make next year the one that actually changes everything. You mentioned experience. That's that's our next point. And thinking about, you know, if you're if you're new to the job force, you're adding everything that you've ever done on your resume to try and add credibility. It's been a job for a long time. Maybe it's not as bad, but focusing on the relevant experience has got to be key here. Right, JP? Yeah, so obviously there's going to be some things that depending on the role, you know, whether you're hiring for an attorney or a paralegal legal assistant, you may have different requirements in terms of, you know, education and training and licensure and things of that nature. But when it comes down to it, there's no substitute for being in the work. The exponential benefits you have from having somebody who's, you know, like you said, early in their career, a year in versus three years versus five years, you get a lot of those, those early gains. And so understanding, like what someone's actual experience has been, not just in terms of total time spent, but in the specific work that they were doing during that time. What is the overlap? Have they been in family law for that whole three years, or did they did they start, at a, at a more, you know, general multiple practice firm and they kind of like only got to family law in the last six months. So understanding, like, who are you actually bringing in and talking to and like, how closely does their actual lived experience, correlate to what you're going to be asking them to do in their role in your firm ongoing? And like you can also use the resume to, to vet their likelihood of, you know, in previous conversations we've talked about is this someone that's going to be like a, consulting room revenue driver, or is it someone that's going to be more of a kind of a grinder that's going to get a bunch of cases done? Like what? What type of lawyer, is this going to be? And if you just think about it from a presentation perspective, if the resonate is pretty bland, boring, and not like, not compelling, it's probably a good indicator for you that they may lean on their confidence in the consultation room and people might lose them, which is typically going to result in slower closing rates, because when people are confused, they can't make a decision versus someone that can click, communicate succinctly and clearly and compellingly. They're probably going to do really well in the consultation room. So like you're you're going to want to very much look for what are, you know, what you're looking for, because that's going to dictate a lot of like a how you use resume filters, like we talked about above the beam, what you're looking for in the resume. So like you, if you might want a really boring resume because it is something that is that's actually going to that might be a really good indicator that this person's been at market. They understand their stuff. They're not trying to be overly salesy. And like, what you need is someone that's going to be a grinder for your firm. Fantastic. That's probably a good fit. So I think you're like looking at the meta of the resume as well as like the actual lived experience. Like JP said, it's important. Yeah, I think that touches on yeah. Our next point as it relates to looking at career growth. And that's something that we really pay attention to. Right. Are these individuals go getters. Are they consistently getting promoted or you know, their next job being at a higher position in their current job? Or have they been in the the current job for a long time, which shows consistency and loyalty? How do, how do you think about that? JP. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things you hit on there that are really important. One is longevity with a specific firm over time. So you do want to obviously there's a little bit of grading that happens here based on how early or late in their career the applicant is. Or early career folks do tend to be a little bit more mobile as they're trying to trying to move. But in general, you're looking for someone who's who's been within a single environment for a long period of time, because that shows loyalty and that person's probably going to be with you for a long time. And, you know, there's nothing worse than, like, spending all that time investing in someone only to have them, you know, walk out the door. So you're looking for a track record that gives you clues to how they're going to perform for you. And then, like you said, advancement. So, like, I don't want to see that you've been in a firm for ten years and you haven't grown like that's actually kind of scary to me. I want to know, like why you weren't, why you weren't advancing during that process. I want you to be able to to tell me about that. The one other thing I'd flag here is, I always look for the gaps between roles, because that can sometimes be a place to tell a story of consistently, when someone is leaving roles, there's a six, seven, eight month gap. I'm not talking about one time, but consistently. That's probably an indication that when they do get out into the market, the market doesn't value them particularly highly. So that's an early clue for you to say, hey, this this person doesn't get snapped up really quickly versus there is no gaps here when they when they leave a position, they were immediately in another firm in another role. Because they are desired in the market. It gives you a good sense of this person's value. Really good. Love the idea of of leveraging kind of these preset, notions as it relates to, like, what we're looking for. But I think there's also a lot of, like, red flags on resumes. I want to dive into that topic a little bit. What have we seen that that is a huge call out that we don't want our listeners to miss. I would say if you've got somebody who can't give you clear, clear wins in a role that always gives me pause. This this could show up either as qualitative or quantitative. I tend to skew towards quantitative. I like to see representing with numbers how you were successful in this role. So Tony talked earlier about like is this person going to be a revenue driver for you. Well, if they tell you in their job description how much revenue they'd like, a good sign, their heads in the right spot versus somebody who's kind of just like, these are the things I did in this role. These were my expectations. Like, that doesn't tell me how you were successful at achieving something. So I'm always looking for when they describe the job, do they describe it in terms of here's how I was successful, or did they describe it as here's what I did? Because that shows you a little bit of their their mindset. Also, sometimes, people can be, let's say generous or liberal with their job titles versus what they actually were doing. And this I do, I, I don't think you'll see this as much in the in the at for actual attorneys. But I do think a lot of the, the other roles, like there's room for someone to say that I was a senior supervisory and is like you, you had one person who reported to you and they were a 16 year old intern. Let's chill out there. Let's not over title that. So look for weird mismatches of like the descriptions of what they did in the role against the job titles. That can be a place for honestly, for me it's like, just be honest, just just say what you did. Because if you're going to lie to me on your resume, you're probably gonna lie to me while you're here. And so I'm, I'm very much watching for those. There's probably, some others that are there very specific here that we could call out. 20 if you want to talk to some of the ones that are family firm, specific. I'd also I'd love to hear like the timing. When do you start to look for red flags? Is this in the screening like technology process, or is this once you've whittled it down to 10 to 15? I would use it in that the technology process for sure I would identify what are those specific red flags that we're looking for. You know, some of those are like JP said, depending on the role, job hopping. So like we're hiring for, someone to be on our intake team, someone that has, like consistently a different job every two years. It's going to be hard for me to be convinced that that's going to be a high quality potential candidate. We might talk to them because they might have relevant experience, but the reality is that person is only going to be with you for two years. So that's that's what's shown on the resume. Thinks some other things that are obviously super basic that you can leverage the technology for is, is is there stuff that's misspelled? Is it is it formatted really poorly? So like there's some basic things that I think are important like to be to be just, you know, slap this together or is this like, do we actually try to present ourselves in a way that's in somewhat in a somewhat compelling way? And then I think also the, it's probably not going to show up on the resume, but this would be one of the screening questions. Something that I dig into is really understand kind of the courtroom experience. Like what? What have they actually done independently now? What were they a part of? What did they actually do independently? Because it's it's very different. When you bring on an attorney that you can hand files to and that can work files really well and move things forward versus one that might be really great at doing that in the future. But they need a lot of hand-holding right now. They're going to be essentially for the next year or two, a potential drain on your on your revenue. And there's not going to be a whole lot of, benefit to them, on your team, unless you're really good at delegation, and identification of, good opportunities. But that is a that's a harder skill. And sometimes it's better off where you're, you're avoiding those opportunities at the front end. A bonus question here. How much weight do you put on references? I actually don't ask for references until I'm at the final stage of the interview process. But I have kind of an interesting take on this, which is I don't just blanket ask for references. My preference is to specifically tell them who I want to talk to. So, like, I want to talk to your supervisor at the last role. And if you're still currently employed, you can't give me your current one. I understand that, like, give me the three before that. And I want to talk to the person who directly managed you. I went there, you know, first and last name. We're asking this during the like the interview process anyway. So it's not new information and the reason is, it's super easy to game the system and be like, I'm going to give you my best friend Joe. And like, he's going to tell you that I'm great. And it's like, cool. I don't care about Joe. I want to hear from your previous supervisors, man, I hate that I lost that person. They were so good. They were. They really contributed. They were a great part of the team. Or like, you know what? They never really showed up on time and I was really struggling to get them involved or whatever. So like, I like references. There are a lot of legwork. And so I would put them late in the process rather than this early at the resume screening stage. Something that I think it's a good signal is if they include references that are very relevant to their position. So like if they're an attorney that's applying for an attorney role, them giving you a bunch of references that are not attorneys in the in that field, that's probably indication you that they don't have connections and they may not be well respected. And like the benefit of, you know, the local law community, especially in a particular area of practice, like family law, it's a small community. You're going to you're going to know and like people are going to have perspectives and opinions. So if you get a resume and people like some, well-known names are referenced as references, it's going to be a really good indication that they're a quality candidate. So, you know, I really think, them proactively giving them to you and then give them those references matching the job role, I think are important. So like, you know, for me, if I was applying for a job and I used, you know, an intake person's an intake person as my reference, where it might be a quality reference, someone who's hiring me as a president, they want to know what other presidents think about me. Not necessarily what my, front line salesperson thought of me. Since we're doing it, since we're doing bonuses here, Tyler, I'd like to throw one more consideration out, which is, at this stage in the process, I'm actively looking for disk qualifiers. I'm looking for the negatives, because I cannot tell you how many times I have had someone come in who squeaked through on the resume, and then you got on the phone with them and started talking to them, and you were just like, this person's great. They're terrible at making resumes, but they're really good at doing the work. It's like, well, I'm not going to hire them to build resumes. I better hired them to do the job. So, so just be aware here, like, you're not looking to qualify somebody at this stage so much as disqualify somebody. So look for the things that are the red flags. Look for the things that are non-negotiables, kick people out and have conversations with the rest where you can find out, like who's, you know, maybe a great interviewer, but sucks at putting together a, you know, a one pager of like, everything about them. You need to know. Yeah. From what I'm hearing from both of you, is leverage technology to find efficiencies in the front end of the process so that you can spend the time going through and doing what actually matters, so that you make sure you're finding a great fit. I still think hiring someone is so much like dating and that you're going to put your best shoes on and have, you know, all the right conversations, but then you got to get into the weeds and you share a bathroom and a toothbrush and all the things. And, you know, that's when the real stuff comes out. So the more you can get to know someone on the front end, the better that eventual relationship will be. We would recommend not sharing toothbrushes, by the way. So just to put that out there, I think that's probably not. That's. Let me guys, appreciate the time and the insights. As always. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to stay tuned! We covered topics in depth. Right now you're listening to our hiring series. We have an owner operator series where we interview law firm owners. We go deep into the weeds as it relates to marketing a law firm online. Make sure to check out these episodes and have a wonderful rest of your day.