Despite best intentions, it has been some time since our last post here on ATL, except for ratcheting up our placement numbers. Since continuing on like that seems a bit gauche to us (and wasteful, considering the cost of this space), and the standard summer slow down in hiring seems to be on us, we wish to apologize for our unintended break and get back to work. For the record, we continue to remain extremely busy in the Asia markets, making already this year 42 US associate or counsel placements at law firms in Hong Kong / China and Singapore, as well as five in-house placements in Hong Kong / China. Our partner work in these markets, though we try to keep a tighter lid on that data, has also been increasingly fast and furious. We are going to now start once again having weekly posts here at Above The Law and also will finally begin more regular posts at theasiachronicles.com. The goal is and has always been daily posts. If any of our readers have a subject you would like addressed, please let us know.
If you would like to meet with any of our Asia team during the next two weeks, Robert Kinney, Robert Kinney and Yuliya Vinokurova will be available in Moscow, Danielle Cyr in New York, and Alexis Lamb in Hong Kong. Robert, Robert and Yuliya just returned from a few weeks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Robert and Robert will also be in Beijing and Hong Kong in the first two weeks of August. Robert will be, as usual, in New York on and off this summer. Danielle and Alexis are of course based in New York and Hong Kong, respectively.
We are opening new Shanghai and Beijing offices soon and feel free to apply to Kinney if you are an experienced and successful recruiter in China, in either biglaw or the corporate world. Email us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
We all make impulse buys from time to time. If there is any buyer’s remorse afterwards, the pain is limited to our pockets being a little light or, sometimes, a bad purchase may even cause a significant but temporary dent in our bank accounts. For example, a couple of weeks ago in Shanghai, our own Robert Kinney and Robert Kinney decided to kill some time on a rainy Saturday afternoon at M50 (50 Moganshan Road, a relatively new place – about 10 years old – where many modern art galleries are situated in 1930’s era buildings). What started as browsing ended up in spur of the moment purchases of six expensive paintings by an up and coming artist (at least that is what the gallery owner claimed), Wang Da, to put on display in our soon-to-be opened new Shanghai offices. The purchases were made while they were simply waiting for a couple of NYC based hedge fund manager friend / clients to meet them at a particular gallery. While Robert and Robert don’t have buyer’s remorse, at least not yet, they had some explaining to do to their wives and close friends, who are well aware that both guys know very little about modern art, and surely not modern Chinese art, and that scam artists in China outnumber real artists about 10,000 to one.
Some of you might be laughing at this example and thinking, “I’d never throw money away on ‘modern art’ in China. But at the same time we find that more and more of the associate candidates we talk to have been more than willing to part with their resumes, handing them over to a random recruiter who happens to call after the associate decides to look at working in a new market like China. Armed with a list of law firms gathered from the internet, and able to blabber on for about ten minutes about law firms, usually speaking in authoritative sounding half-truths, these upstarts are more common and insidious than we would like to believe. Especially galling is the overuse of the tired old BS line, “Joe Partner at firm X met with me the other day and asked me to try and recruit you specifically”). It is astounding to us and almost comical that recruiters who claim to focus on US to HK / China associate placements are able to, through a cold-call phone call or two, secure resumes from associates at top US firms who wish to move back to China or relocate there for the first time.
In many ways, handing out your resume in such an impulsive and haphazard manner is more alarming and has more potential negative consequences than buying a new house on-line without as much as seeing a photo, knowing the neighborhood at issue, or having any negotiation involved. Of course, most would never do that.
However, as a rising US associate at a top law firm, your resume is arguably your greatest asset, and is almost certainly most associates’ most valuable stock in trade. Your resume is effectively a form of currency good for purchase of just one thing – top-flight advice on how to maximize the opportunities before you to enhance your career. For many of our readers, the resume they possess is, when reduced to a recruiting fee, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Our purpose here is to try to help you spend wisely and make sure you get maximum value for that currency.
For recruiters who have no experience in a market and do not plan to be there long, necessarily, obtaining a resume is all about getting to an offer/acceptance as soon as possible. Too often, even partner candidates find out far too late that the recruiter did not have the candidate’s interests in mind in the process. Here is the blurb published by a courthouse news service about a lawsuit filed this week in Dallas, Texas, against a legal recruiter by a former partner candidate of that recruiter:
Fraud, negligence, fiduciary duty and contract actions where the plaintiff attorney says he was recruited away as a partner at K&L Gates to the Dallas office of Patton Boggs, netting the defendant recruiter substantial compensation. He says she never disclosed …..
Further detail on this case would be meaningless, but suffice it to say that even partners wind up regretting their impulse buys. This particular partner seems to be a little off his rocker to think that he has recourse for making a bad decision.
How can you avoid an impulse purchase mistake? When you are looking to lateral to or within HK / China, remember that the choice of recruiter is not about finding a job, but more about which job should you take, which firms you should target and why. It can be a complex journey of several months (even for the most marketable the process is usually a bit lengthy) and you need an agent guiding you in this process, not simply a mass emailer of your resume.
Keep in mind the following when handing your resume to and engaging a recruiter to represent
you for your HK / China move:
-Once a recruiter sends your resume to a firm, that recruiter has exclusive representation of you at that firm for six months (in some cases longer) regardless of whether you want the representation to continue or not. In other words, you cannot fire a recruiter once your resume is sent to firms.
-It is critical that you ask for references of US associates who your potential recruiter has personally placed in HK / China in the past. Don’t simply be satisfied with the list of names – call these references! At Kinney we work together and utilize our individual relationships collectively to help candidates. Our Asia recruiting team can easily provide over 100 such references to past candidates who were satisfied and refer us to their friends and colleagues.
-Remember, you are interviewing any recruiter with whom you speak. You are considering placing a critical job search and your future career marketability and practice area focus decision (commonly a big part of which offer to accept in China) in the hands of this person you are talking to. Make sure that you find them impressive, because they will represent you.
-Have a lengthy discussion with the potential recruiter about your target market and especially the potential target firms. If you don’t feel your potential recruiter could discuss your target market at length on the basis of real and verifiable data, if you do not think that he/she has genuine relationships in the market with real players, then don’t use them.
-Before you target a firm, you should feel comfortable demanding from your recruiter a discussion for an hour or more about that office, those partners, the practice, and past associates’ reasons for leaving. Most recruiters don’t have anything more than surface information, if anything at all, on such issues, so don’t use them.
-Make sure your recruiter knows the relevant partners well or at least has a good working relationship with them. If all your recruiter has is contact info for recruiting coordinators and list of openings, avoid at all costs.
-If possible, work with a recruiter that you can meet in person and who also regularly meets in person with the relevant partners at your target firms. This is at the core of our philosophy at Kinney and why our Asia recruiters are required to split time between the US and Asia markets, rather than remain always in the market they are based. So much of Asia biglaw US associate recruiting is moves from US to Asia, so if you are making such a move, you want to work with a recruiter that understands very well your background, your current market, and also your target market(s) in Asia.
-Any recruiter focused on HK / China knows about all the firm openings, so don’t fall for the nonsensical reasoning that once a recruiter happens to spit out a few firm names, you are somehow obligated to use the recruiter who first happened to spit out those firm names to you. Knowing about openings is of so little value that we often share that information openly with competitors.
-It is a sad fact that most recruiters will lie or at least greatly exaggerate in order to get your resume in their hands. If something does not sound right or you cannot get any verification of a recruiter’s claim (especially of the number of placements they have been involved with recently in your target market), it is more than likely that you are dealing with someone who is spinning BS.
-It is a sad fact that many recruiters (probably less than 50% fortunately) will send your resume to firms without your permission, even when you specifically instruct that they not do so. There is really no punishment to the recruiter for doing this, so it is an unfortunate common practice in the industry. Think about it: if a recruiter gets you an interview at a firm that you did not give her permission to contact on your behalf, are you going to explain to the interviewing partner that you did not even know you applied at their firm, that it was not one of your intended targets? Don’t give your resume to a recruiter and tell him, “just this opening.” Find a recruiter you trust to represent you in the market and stick with him/her.
At Kinney we figure that if we make all the attorneys we work with or simply give career advice too (those not moving anywhere at present) very happy with our efforts for them, then a lot of placement fees will be a direct by-product of that. Thus, we are not aggressively looking to get our hands on resumes, but instead aggressively looking for ways that we can attract rising associates interested in Asia to contact us for market info and career advice. Representing those attorneys in their present or future job searches is simply a by-product of that effort.
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