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You post an opening for a legal assistant and ninety resumes land in your inbox by Friday. Most of them have never touched a family file, half do not live in the province, and a good chunk are clearly firing off the same application to every posting on the board. That is not a hiring problem. That is a writing problem, and it starts with the job description.
Most postings are written to attract. They should be written to filter. A posting that tells the truth plainly enough will make the wrong candidates close the tab and the right ones think, finally, someone described my actual job. Your goal is fewer applications and better ones. Here is how to write for that.
The Two Sentences That Do Most of the Filtering
Somewhere near the top, before the culture talk, put two sentences that describe a specific person on a specific day. Not "the ideal candidate is a motivated self-starter." That describes no one. Try: "You will manage the calendars and limitation deadlines for two family lawyers, prepare financial statements and Form 13s, and be the first voice a stressed client hears on the phone."
Read that back. Someone who has never prepared a Form 13 knows in one sentence whether this is their world. Someone who hates phones and wants a quiet back-office role also knows. Both of them save you the trouble of reading their resume. The two sentences do more screening than any keyword filter, because they force a reader to picture the actual work and honestly ask whether they can do it.
Tip. Write these two sentences by describing what the person will actually do on a normal Tuesday. If you cannot picture the Tuesday, you are not ready to hire yet, and no posting will fix that.
Describe the Work, Not the Wish List
The lazy posting lists twenty bullet points of qualities: detail-oriented, team player, excellent communicator, thrives under pressure. Every applicant claims all twenty because none of them can be disproven from a resume. A list of traits is easy for anyone to claim on a cover letter.
Replace qualities with tasks. Instead of "strong organizational skills," write "you will keep three lawyers' bring-forward systems current and flag deadlines before they become emergencies." Instead of "excellent written communication," write "you will draft first versions of client letters and correspondence for lawyer review." Tasks are checkable. A candidate reads a task and either has done it or has not, and the honest ones tell you which.
This also protects you later. When you get to screening resumes, a task-based posting gives you something concrete to match against. And when a new hire's first ninety days do not go the way you hoped, you will find the gap almost always traces back to a task that lived in your head but never made it onto the page.
Name the Deal Breakers Out Loud
Every role has conditions that are not negotiable. Say them. If the role is fully in-office, write "this role is in-office five days a week in our downtown Winnipeg registry, no remote option." If it requires evening coverage during trial weeks, say that too. If you need someone already able to work in Canada, state it plainly and let the law society and immigration rules speak for themselves.
People treat deal breakers as awkward, so they bury them or leave them out and hope it works out. It does not. The applicant who needs remote work applies anyway, interviews well, and then declines your offer three weeks later. You have spent hours screening someone a single honest sentence would have filtered on day one.
A deal breaker you refuse to name does not disappear. It just waits until the offer stage to cost you a hire.
There is a kindness in this too. The candidate who cannot do in-office five days would rather find out from your posting than from a rejection after they rearranged childcare for an interview. Being clear is not being cold. It is respecting people's time as much as your own.
Salary Bands Filter Faster Than Any Screening Call
Nothing sorts applicants faster than a real number. When you leave salary off, you invite everyone from the person who needs twice your budget to the person who would happily take less and resent you for it. A posted band ends both problems in the first ten seconds a candidate reads.
Post a real range, not a comically wide one. "45,000 to 75,000" is not a band, it is a shrug. If the honest range for this role at your firm is 52,000 to 58,000 depending on experience, write that. In several provinces you will need to post a range anyway as pay transparency rules expand, so build the habit now and confirm the current requirement with your provincial regulator.
Note. A tight, honest band signals confidence. Candidates read a specific range as a firm that knows exactly what the role is worth, which is the kind of firm the good ones want to join.
The band also sets up every conversation that follows. When you later hold compensation reviews, you are building on a number the person agreed to with full information, not a figure you sprung on them after they were already committed.
Test Your Posting on a Real Person Before You Publish
Before it goes live, send the draft to one person who actually does the job you are hiring for. A legal assistant, a law clerk, a bookkeeper. Ask them two questions: does this describe a real role, and would you apply? Their answers will surprise you.
They will spot the buzzwords you went blind to. They will tell you the "strong Excel skills" line reads as "we have no idea what we want." They will notice that you described the work as glamorous when it is genuinely, honestly, a lot of scheduling and follow-up, and that pretending otherwise only draws people who will leave when they meet the real thing. A five minute read from an insider is the cheapest quality check in hiring.
Once the posting is sharp, the rest of your process gets easier. A clean intake feeds a clean shortlist, which feeds a fair working interview and a smooth onboarding plan. Keeping all of that in one place, from the posting through the offer, is exactly the kind of thing the Hiring tools in A1 CMS are built to hold, so nothing lives only in your head or a lost email thread.
Write the posting as a filter and you change the whole shape of your week. Instead of ninety resumes you skim with dread, you get fifteen from people who read the honest description of the work, saw themselves in it, and chose to raise their hand anyway. That is not fewer applicants because your firm is unappealing. It is fewer because you told the truth early, and the truth did the sorting for you. For more on the rest of the process, the other posts in this series pick up right where this one leaves off.
