Lateral recruiting doesn’t run on cycles; it runs on relationships. Whether you're sourcing from agency partners, LinkedIn, attorney referrals, or a tip from a practice group leader, most lateral candidates enter your pipeline long before there is a formal role. The friction of entering and tracking those relationships in legacy legal software often pushes teams into spreadsheets, email threads, and notes scattered across systems.

That’s why Flo Recruit dedicated a major portion of our Q3 and Q4 2025 product roadmap and engineering resources to elevating our applicant tracking system (ATS) for lateral attorney hiring workflows. These enhancements are now live, and this round-up highlights everything released in 2025 along with what this foundation makes possible in early 2026.

The Round Up: Recent Flo Launches for Lateral Recruiting Teams ✨

Did you know? Flo deploys updates every two weeks on our cloud-based software solutions. Clients get continuous improvements paired with clear product updates from Customer Success, which means you always know what’s new and what’s coming next.

1. Create New Candidate Profiles Directly from the Candidates List

Lateral pipelines often start before a search does. Now you can create a candidate profile with only a name, then build from there: email, phone, LinkedIn, custom qualifying questions, internal notes, and more. This creates a true CRM-like workflow where you can begin tracking a relationship long before assigning a job.

2. Log and View Communications with a Candidate

A lateral candidate's journey includes check-ins, calls, meetings, agency updates, and interest-level conversations. Flo now supports:

• Logging any communication type
• Automatically tracking job status emails
• Preparing for automatic logging of interview and event communications coming soon

This centralizes scattered touchpoints so recruiters can maintain clarity on how relationships evolve over time.

3. Automatic Duplicate Detection for New Profiles

When creating a profile, Flo flags potential duplicates based on matching first and last name and directs you to existing records. As more sources feed into your pipeline, this helps your team maintain a clean, trustworthy database.

4. Add Candidates to a Job Directly from Their Profile

If you spot someone promising in your talent pool, you can now add them to an open search directly from their candidate profile. The application opens instantly and is ready to complete without navigating away.

5. View Full Candidate History From the Jobs Page Without Navigating Back to the Profile

A candidate may be involved in multiple searches over time, or have past activity captured in Flo. With the new slide-out panel, you can see their entire history from within the Jobs page. This eliminates the need to switch back to the candidate profile to understand prior engagements, interviews, or applications.

6. Automatically Post New Jobs to LinkedIn

When you publish a job in Flo, it can now automatically post to LinkedIn. This helps associate-level and business-services recruiting teams reach a broader audience without duplicating administrative work.

7. HRIS API for Smooth Handoffs to HR

With Flo’s HRIS API, IT teams can automate the movement of hired candidate data from Flo into the firm’s HR system. This reduces manual effort and keeps downstream systems consistent and up to date.

8. Faster Release Cadence and Clear Product Updates

Flo’s engineering and product teams operate on an every-two-weeks deployment schedule. This structure is a major reason we accomplished so much for lateral teams in 2025 — and why there is so much more coming in the first months of 2026. Clients receive transparent product updates and always know what has launched and what is on the horizon.

Why Candidate-Centric Workflows Matter More Than Ever

Lateral recruiting depends on proactive relationships. And the data backs it up:

• In more than 500 lateral searches run in Flo from July ’24 to July ’25, 57% of candidates who received offers were sourced via write-in. 
• In a separate analysis of 40+ firms, 68% of lateral candidates were entered manually, not via job postings.

This reflects how lateral recruiting truly works: opportunities develop organically, information arrives from many channels, and firms need a system that can capture and track it all. Spreadsheets create gaps; candidate-centric systems close them.

Why Firms Are Switching to Flo Recruit Applicant Tracking

Trusted by 150+ Law Firms

Including 75% of AmLaw 50 and more than 50 firms using Flo ATS specifically for lateral hiring.

A Company That Understands the Nuances of Legal Hiring

“The customer support is unmatched. Flo Recruit’s responsiveness and understanding of all of the nuances of legal hiring is a key reason to switch from any other system.”
— Nancy Parker, Director of Legal Recruiting, Fried Frank

Real-Time Data and Flexible Tools Recruiters Can Control

“We now have access to powerful analytics that were simply not available with our old system.”
— Jaimee Slovak, Chief Recruiting and Integration Officer, Winstead

Unified Experience & Reporting Across Hiring Types

“Everything lives in one place now, which is so important for how we work.”
— Shannon DeGennaro, Director of Recruiting & Professional Development, Brooks Pierce

Security That Meets Law Firm Standards

Flo Recruit is SOC-2 Type II compliant and built to meet the highest expectations for data security and privacy in the legal industry. Your hiring information remains protected at every stage.

See What’s New — and What’s Coming Next

These updates represent a major advancement in candidate-centric lateral workflows, and they would not have been possible without the partnership and feedback of our clients. Thank you to the recruiting teams who share insights, test early ideas, help shape the roadmap, and collaborate with us to build the best system for legal hiring.

More enhancements are already underway for early 2026, and we can’t wait to show you.

👉 Book a demo to see the newest features live and preview what’s coming next.