Transcript
A (0:01)
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B (0:30)
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business in the Becker Private Equity Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by one of the brightest people I get to visit with regularly. We're joined today by a partner at McGuire Woods, David Pivnick. We're going to talk to David today about talent management issues, hiring, firing, and a lot more. David, can you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience?
C (0:55)
Yeah, absolutely, Scott, thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure to visit with you, a partner, a litigator at McGuire Woods. And my practice is really focused on both healthcare litigation and private equity litigation and heavily concentrated on responding to government investigations and defending False Claims act cases. And I'm located in the Chicago office and as people who have listened to us before know, I like this. Very passionate about sports. I like to chat about those things as well. Though I think today you have some more serious topics for us which will also be fun.
B (1:29)
No, thank you so much. Thank you. And let me start with. We're going to talk about talent today and we'll talk about when hiring, when evaluating talent. And David's done a remarkable job of mentoring other partners, hiring partners, people that have become partners, and his great track record here. How do you think about evaluating talent, especially other indicators, behaviors that matter most to you when you're trying to look at hiring, how do you look at some of those things and what do you think about?
C (1:59)
Great question, Scott. I mean, the first thing, it's interesting when we interview at the law firm, you know, I almost take it as a given that the people we're interviewing sort of have the intellectual horsepower to succeed, or at least they passed the level of where you need to be to succeed. They're in law school, they're at good law schools, they're doing well because we have grade cutoffs and we only recruit at certain schools, etc. So I sort of start from the baseline of assuming folks that are sitting across the table from me have the intellectual horsepower. Now, that obviously varies. And if I'm interviewing someone who's top 10 in their class at a Harvard or Michigan or University of Chicago that might land, you know, more heavily than someone who is just at our grade, cut off at a school that's rated a little lower. But, you know, we're meeting with people who are generally very smart. So I'm looking for other things on a resume or in the conversation over the course of an interview that I think is going to lead to success that's going to be indicative of a higher probability of success than just the academics. And so one thing is, is that I think comes across on certain resumes, definitely comes across in interviews is work ethic. I've met with people who have never held a job prior to law school, and I mean no jobs. And I find that very surprisingly troubling. And I met with folks who worked full time while putting themselves through law school, or worked three days a week while in law school, or were on a varsity team While getting a 3.9 GPA in undergrad at an elite university. And so looking through the indicia of does this person have a strong work ethic to back up their academic credentials? Do they have a history of achievement? Against that backdrop of effort, I view that as incredibly helpful. I look at leadership positions. Most people have stuff or talk about things, clubs they're involved in, student associations, extracurricular activities, might be charitable, whatever it is. But I think there's a meaningful difference between saying I'm a member of 10 organizations versus I was the president of this entity and I led X, Y and Z drive, or I spearheaded this initiative, I helped grow the organization from 20 members to 100, or I founded the business and ran it. So again, looking at the actual experiences and how people can talk about those experiences to show meaningful involvement, leadership and drive, I view as all incredibly helpful. And then the other thing, which can be harder to suss out, but I'm looking for consistency. So when, when I see someone who comes in or I'm talking to someone and you know, they, they struggled in undergrad and then all of a sudden they did well in law school or vice versa, or they, they don't really have a demonstrated track record or they had a couple of great classes and then several that were terrible, it might raise questions as to whether they're taking days off or how they're approaching things. Whereas looking for sort of sustained excellence at different levels doesn't have to be at the absolute 99th percentile at every level, although that's obviously great. But showing a history of success consistently over the years before Coming in for an interview, I think is a helpful indicator of future success as well.