Dave Carvajal

Big Law’s Newest Competition for Talent Is an Old Foe

By Gina Passarella / August 29, 2017

The first time law firms found themselves fighting with the technology industry for talent, it was the 1990s. Tech startups offered stock options, the chance to work on cutting-edge matters and a suit-free office environment. “At that point we were losing pretty junior folks directly to true startups,” recalls a management committee member of an Am Law 25 firm. “It was a real cosmic shift in our talent pool [and] drove cultural change like law firms going business casual.”

In the age of the millennial generation, tech is again a tough rival to law firms’ associate recruitment and retention efforts. Leaders at firm after firm point to technology companies as the biggest draw for young associates who are looking to make a change. But this time, it’s different.

While losing lawyers to tech used to be a problem only for the Silicon Valley firms, the phenomenon has spread across the country, as the tech scene has made homes in cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and places in between. Meanwhile, the tech world has grown up over the last 20 years and so have its legal needs. Tech companies need help with more than just Silicon Valley financing. Now they are looking for help on litigation, M&A and more, says the Am Law 25 management committee member.

“Whether it’s a Google or Facebook, [they are] way, way, way out of the garage. But they still have an allure. There is a difference going to one of those companies today. You may still get to wear jeans and T-shirts if you go to one of those companies, but you are going to a big, grown-up, mature company with grown-up problems,” this lawyer says, noting that a range of more sophisticated work is attractive to the firm’s talent pool.

And because these companies are larger, they are able to take even more junior lawyers to fill out departments, causing more second- and third-years to leave law firm life. “The same level of associates that used to go to big corporate America like pharma or Ford or GM might now go to a tech company,” the management member says.

Dave Carvajal, who has been a headhunter in the New York tech start-up scene for more than 20 years, says it used to be that top talent out of the top programs in the Northeast would have three options: finance, management consulting or the West Coast internet scene. That changed in 2008, he says, when the New York technology sector saw a boom in the wake of the credit crisis and the world of investment banking and management consulting lost some of its luster.

Carvajal says he has seen a number of lawyers, somewhat disillusioned with law firm life, reach out to him looking to reinvent their lives. He has often seen candidates who became lawyers mostly because their parents wanted them to. “But what truly lights them up is expressing another part of their being or their brain,” Carvajal says. “They make these epiphanies in personal growth. They want to take a pivot on the strategic direction of their life. Tech startups are attracting the best talent and allow them to express that creativity.”

Some law firms are forming startup incubators of their own, offering cheaper legal services
to growing companies or helping set them up with investor-clients. But that work isn’t always enough to keep associates satisfied. Carvajal says that millennials have a “supremely larger interest” in having “mission orientation” and being a part of something that is being driven with “wisdom, meaning and purpose.”

Investment banking, and even the law, can feel soulless to this younger generation, he says, adding that they are “looking to disrupt and change the world.” What better way to do that than through technology?

Via: The American Lawyer

Alt-Right Activists Thrust Silicon Valley Into Debate on Hate Speech

By Martha C. White / August 21, 2017

Even as it wrestles with its own diversity issues, Silicon Valley has become the reluctant arbiter of the line where free speech crosses into hate speech in the wake of the deadly protests in Charlottesville.

In an age where a lack of condemnation is tantamount to complicity, experts say tech firms have no choice but to disassociate from the alt-right, although as a growing number of tech companies cut off white nationalist groups from the platforms they use for communication, commerce, and content distribution, some have criticized the response as too little, too late.

“There’s a very intimate history between internet service providers and white supremacist groups,” said Joan Donovan, media manipulation research lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. “There was plenty of warning that this stuff was being coordinated in their spaces,” she said, but tech companies initially resisted policing the activity.

Historically, Silicon Valley has presented itself on embracing diversity in all its forms, albeit for pragmatic rather than political reasons: Cutthroat competition for users and talent means that companies can’t afford to be exclusionary.

“The reason this is a heightened issue in technology is technology is much more heterogeneous — it’s all over the world,” said Dave Carvajal, CEO of a technology-focused recruiting firm.

“It’s this belief people have that the tech industry should be the most modern, the most cutting edge,” said Brian Kropp, HR Practice Leader at CEB (now Gartner). “It also has this promise of capturing what tomorrow is going to be like.”

But putting these egalitarian principles into practice hasn’t always been easy. Even before Charlottesville, companies have stumbled in the gap between “bro culture” and Silicon Valley’s self-image of open-mindedness.

Uber’s ouster of CEO Travis Kalanick shone an embarrassing spotlight on the ingrained misogyny at some firms, and Google’s recent firing of engineer James Damore, who argued in a widely distributed memo that women are biologically less well-suited for tech jobs, triggered accusations that the search giant is intolerant of conservative views.

“I think what’s happening is a lot of these kinds of deep-rooted issues are being brought to the surface because of the political theater that’s happening right now. It’s stirring up a lot of this,” Carvajal said.

The violence at a white nationalist rally that left one counter-protester dead and others injured has brought this tension into sharper focus.

“They’ve been pushing very hard on many of these issues. Now they’re at a point where they have to make really hard decisions… whether or not they stand up to all the values they’ve talked about and promoted,” Kropp said.

Some tech firms have been more receptive to curtailing alt-right activity than others, said Rashad Robinson, executive director of advocacy group Color of Change.

“A lot of them seem super-focused on terms of services and this idea of an open platform,” he said. “We hear things like they share our values… but at this time there’s not going to be an update to policy.”

Some of the challenges are logistical rather than ideological, since much of the enforcement can’t be automated. It takes humans making judgement calls, and the line between talk and action online isn’t always clear. “There hasn’t been a good model so far for policy around how to monitor or prevent certain amounts of content,” Donovan said.

Tech companies also don’t want to alienate potential customers or trigger a public relations backlash. According to Ted Marzilli, CEO of YouGov BrandIndex, consumer sentiment metrics for Facebook, Apple and GoDaddy reflected little change this week. “They’re not getting a lot of credit from consumers, but they’re not being punished, either,” he said.

This could embolden other Silicon Valley leaders to terminate alt-right and white nationalist business relationships, Marzilli said, even if it costs them. “These things are always a bit risky for companies from the perspective of dollars and cents,” he said.

Whether driven by a sense of moral obligation, concern about public perception or some combination of the two, last weekend’s violence seemed to be a wake-up call, Robinson said. “It’s certainly accelerated since Charlottesville,” he said of companies’ willingness to cut ties with white nationalist groups.

“They started to think about their role in promoting this kind of talk,” Donovan said. “One thing these platforms really understand about themselves is they don’t just allow speech to flow, they do the job of coordinating action… They saw that this kind of open unmoderated speech online produced violent effects.”

Via: NBC News

The personality trait most people see as a weakness may actually be a huge asset in business

Áine Cain / July 20, 2017

Humility isn’t a trait you’d often associate with business.

Confidence, resilience, and persuasiveness are all no-brainers, but it’s hard to see how a generous slice of humble pie will get you ahead.

If anything, it would seem like having a modest view of your abilities and putting others before you would hold you back even in a mildly competitive office culture.

But that’s where Dave Carvajal, CEO of executive headhunting firm “Dave Partners” and author of the upcoming book “Hire Smart from the Start,” disagrees.

“Humility, I think, is woefully undervalued in American business,” he tells Business Insider.

In fact, Carvajal, who has placed execs within companies like Warby Parker, Shutterstock, and Tumblr, says that smart companies should seek out humble folks. That goes double for companies looking to disrupt or innovate industries.

With disruption comes mistakes and lessons learned on the job. Humble people aren’t ruled by their egos — they can admit to and learn from mistakes and change course when necessary. They don’t strive for success for themselves, but instead work toward the betterment of their teams. They avoid division and undercutting, preferring a more collaborative style of leadership and teamwork.

That makes them ideal for companies that are striving to enter new territory.

“All learning and growth requires openness,” Carvajal says.

Via: Business Insider

A recruiter for some of the hottest tech companies shares the biggest hiring mistake companies can make

Áine Cain / July 19, 2017

Hiring the wrong person can be an expensive mistake.

Twenty-seven percent of US employers surveyed by CareerBuilder said that just one bad hire cost their company more than $50,000. And Zappos CEO Tony Hseih once estimated his own bad hires cost the company more than $100 million.

All that money goes down the toilet when things don’t work out.

Dave Carvajal, CEO of executive headhunting firm “Dave Partners” and author of the upcoming book “Hire Smart from the Start,” has placed execs within companies like Warby Parker, Shutterstock, and Tumblr.

He says that, too often, companies looking to make an executive-level hire make one big mistake: they focus too much on technical capabilities.

“Any reasonably intelligent person can look at a résumé and say, ‘This is a great CTO,’ but that’s not the task at hand,” Carvajal tells Business Insider. “The task at hand is, ‘This a great CTO, for us.’ Those two little words, ‘for us,’ change everything.”

In order to better vet candidates, Carvajal says that a business must first get “crystal clear” on its core values and put technical prowess on the back-burner.

Because all of your best candidates should possess the required technical skills and work experience — that goes without saying.

“People are more likely to fail based on fit, not based on technical skills,” Carvajal says. “Whether anyone will succeed or fail at any company has everything to do with fit. What we really have to vet for is those core values.”

So, instead of getting dazzled by strong résumés or focusing all your energy on assessing a candidate’s skills, make sure you’re truly determining whether or not their goals are in line with those of your company.

In the end, that’s a better predictor of whether they’ll succeed at your company.

Via: Business Insider

Why You’re Reading Work Emails Right Now

By Martha C. White / May 29, 2017

First, the good news: More Americans are taking advantage of the vacation time granted to them by their employers. The bad news: They’re spending more of that supposedly off-the-clock time working.

A new annual report from the U.S. Travel Association found that, after dropping to an all-time low of 16 days in 2014, the average American worker took 16.8 vacation days in 2016, up from 16.2 days last year.

The reversal is a good sign, according to Katie Denis, the report’s author and senior director of Project: Time Off. “This year we felt like it was more substantial,” she said.

Still, she added, American workers forfeited 206 million vacation days last year. That was an 8 percent drop from 2015, however. “I think there’s greater awareness of the importance of vacation,” Denis said.

Or it could be that we’re taking more vacation days because we’ve simply come to think of “vacation” as working poolside at a resort rather than in the office. A new survey from Glassdoor.com found that although 91 percent of workers took at least some vacation time in the last year — up from 85 percent three years ago — about two-thirds of those people say they work during vacation, an increase of five percentage points over that same time frame.

“Some employers and managers have also gotten used to reaching out to their employees at all hours. That’s a pretty bad way to work,” said Scott Dobroski, community expert at Glassdoor.

Are We Afraid of Vacations?

Dobroski said it would benefit companies more if they actively encouraged workers to step back and take a real break. “More employers need to remind their employees that vacation time is valued… you need to use it,” he said. “They will come back more productive, re-energized, more creative.”

But a new survey from OfficeTeam, a Robert Half company, indicates that a disconnect remains between the lip service companies pay to the value of vacation and the unspoken cultural codes that prevent many workers from using their time off.

Roughly 40 percent of workers surveyed by Robert Half said flexible schedules were the top summertime perk they would like, but a parallel survey of HR managers found that the number of companies offering this dropped by 13 percentage points over five years.

Daryl Pigat, division director at OfficeTeam, suggested one reason behind this could be that flexibility is integrated into more companies’ year-round scheduling practices today. But he also said the survey results — which showed that companies have sharply pulled back on other summertime perks like company picnics, relaxed dress codes and early-dismissal Fridays — could indicate a shift back to a more buttoned-up work environment.

“There could be a trend towards bringing back a little more formality to the workplace,” he said. “I think we’re at a tipping point… I definitely see where companies are pulling back a little bit.”

What’s more, experts say another phenomenon that could be making Americans’ vacation habits look artificially rosy is the growth of “unlimited” vacation, popularized by tech companies like LinkedIn and Netflix.

“The rising trend is this theme of unlimited vacation. It’s certainly crossing boundaries into other industries now,” Dobroski said.

While this might sound good in theory, HR pros say it can actually wind up being more advantageous for the employer. Dobroski pointed out that employees with an unlimited policy might no longer track their vacation days, making them less likely to realize if they’re not taking it.

There’s also a significant financial benefit for companies, said Dave Carvajal, CEO of a technology-focused recruiting firm. For fast-paced and competitive sectors like tech start-ups where turnover can be high, unlimited vacation can give companies a legal way around paying as much as $20,000 or $30,000 in unused vacation pay to departing highly paid workers.

“On the face of it, it seems very appealing, it has a very positive sheen on it. Most employees don’t actually realize or understand that’s the driving motivation behind it,” he said.

The Office Is in Our Pocket

Without a culture that encourages people to take time off, people are too stressed about the work they leave behind to really enjoy their vacations. According to a new survey by Wyndham Vacation Rentals, 36 percent of respondents said they were stressed about falling behind at work while planning for a vacation, and 31 percent said it took until at least the second day of vacation for them to unwind.

“If you have a smartphone, your office is still in your pocket. Without proper preparation, it can be very stressful,” Denis said.

OfficeTeam found that around a third of HR managers complain that employees don’t do a good job planning ahead for summer vacations, and industry experts say laying the groundwork for work coverage before you go is the best proactive step employees can take to keep work from encroaching on vacation.

“I think a lot of it is planning. Planning is by far the easiest and best thing you can do,” Denis said.

“It’s all about planning ahead, and I don’t mean one day in advance. You should be thinking about this two weeks in advance,” Dobroski said.

That can be easier said than done, though. Denis said the new Project: Time Off survey found that people who planned ahead for their absence were both more likely to take a vacation and happier overall, but that people working for companies that tacitly or expressly frown on taking time off were less likely to broach the subject of how their responsibilities are covered while they were out of the office — so they wound up being the ones fielding emails or participating in conference calls during their vacation.

“During the recession, companies asked people to do more with less, and coming out of the recession, that didn’t really change,” Denis said. “I’d say there’s a lot of lingering workload pressures.”

“Over the past few years, we’ve transitioned into a society of workers that is always on,” Carvajal said. “It’s the first thing people do when they wake up, they check their phone,” he said.

Via: NBC News