Plusses and Minuses: Navigating HR with a Legal Mind

Kyle McEntee:

We're joined today by Seret Gonzalez, Senior Director of HR and Recruiting at Fermata Energy. You describe yourself as a recruiting nerd, but that wasn't the case when you initially went into practice. What work did you do right after graduating law school?

Seret Gonzales:

Right after law school, I practiced immigration law for about five years. So within immigration, there's a labor and employment side to it, and then there's family side to it, and there's asylum work or other types of relief. So I did full gamut immigration law, some labor and employment.

Kyle McEntee:

So it gave you a little bit of early exposure to kind of what you're working on now in the HR field.

Seret Gonzales:

Right. It did.

Kyle McEntee:

So after that, you then went on to do some legal recruiting.

Seret Gonzales:

I did. So I went to an agency to look for a new position and wound up being recruited to be a legal recruiter. Had never anticipated doing something like that in my life. It definitely is more a sales job than anything else, and I actually fell into it and loved it.

Kyle McEntee:

What is it that persuaded you to do something so different?

Seret Gonzales:

I mean, they have to be good salespeople to sell you on the opportunity, and they have to see something in you to believe that you have the ability to do the same with others. So I liked the idea of talking to candidates and helping them with their career moves and stuff and so forth. And I was good at it, which I didn't expect.

Kyle McEntee:

With your current experience, looking back, do you see what they saw? Or are you still like, I don't know how I fell into this?

Seret Gonzales:

I think I see some of the elements of what they saw. But I think I also molded myself more into the role as it progressed and as I watched other individuals doing similar positions. Because it wasn't quite the, “oh, I'm going to help everyone find a job opportunity.”

There's only a select group of individuals that clients are willing to pay a legal recruiter to recruit for, which are usually for difficult to fill positions. So you don't get to be the employment counsel to everyone that you meet. But it was a good experience while it lasted.

Kyle McEntee:

And so that's why you tried to make the transition to a position where you could help more people more often?

Seret Gonzales:

Actually, I think it was more the economy that necessitated that. Clients weren't really relying on legal recruiters or sales recruiters. And so I've decided to go in-house to law firms and do the legal recruiting for them.

Kyle McEntee:

Got to be quite a different experience from the people you were recruiting. How did they experience that differently based on whether you were in-house doing it for the firm or at a third party doing it on the firm's behalf?

Seret Gonzales:

I mean, I think it's an easier sell to candidates when you're an internal recruiter because they know that you are associated with the law firm. Whereas when you're a legal recruiter, you're associated with a third party. So there's a little lack of trust that exists in that relationship that is easier to gain when you're in-house working for a corporation or a law firm. And there's a lot of trust that needs to be built when you're working on the sales side.

Kyle McEntee:

And trust is also really critical to you now as an HR leader. Can you describe what it is that you're doing and who you're working for?

Seret Gonzales:

I am the full gamut of HR-related things at Fermata Energy, which is a proprietary vehicle to everything software platform and bidirectional hardware technology that turns EB into energy storage assets.

Kyle McEntee:

So how big is the company?

Seret Gonzales:

So right now, the company is 45-ish.

Kyle McEntee:

And is it FTEs or all kinds of employees, employees and consultants?

Seret Gonzales:

No, those would just be the full-time employees. And then I would say we probably have about 10 to 20-ish people on a consultant basis. But we've varied in size. We've been as large as 70 and as small as 45.

Kyle McEntee:

And how long have you been with the company?

Seret Gonzales:

So I've been with the company for over two years.

Kyle McEntee:

And has the size fluctuated in that time or has it been pretty stable since you've been there?

Seret Gonzales:

No, it's fluctuated within the time frame that I've been there. So the EV energy space, a number of companies had been experiencing some tightness in terms of funding and so forth. And so we've been on the conservative side to protect ourselves in that environment. But that's all conditioned on politics and what changes in that space do.

Kyle McEntee:

Are you involved in the strategic conversations about, you know, should we be growing? Should we be keeping our sizes the same? Should we be getting a little smaller?

Seret Gonzales:

Yeah, I'm involved in those conversations. I report to the CEO. We have regular leadership meetings with the C-suite. And then I also participate in some of the board meetings related to compensation and growth.

Kyle McEntee:

So you have this legal background. You have your JD. You have about five years of lawyering experience. How are you utilizing that legal background to assist in your work?

Seret Gonzales:

I don't think you ever take off your legal hat. I mean, once you've become a lawyer, it's kind of you're indoctrinated. It becomes part of your persona. I mean, I remember when I first left law school, it was difficult to have conversations with people who did go to law school because they found you to be challenging because you're always looking for issues and spotting things. I don't think it ever goes away. And I think in every position that I've held, that has come with it, to the annoyance of some or to the benefit of others.

So I, on a day-to-day basis, feel like I'm putting that lawyer hat on. It gives you a unique perspective with advising from an HR perspective. Sometimes it's a little constraining because I'm always worrying and warning people about what can happen on the other side of something.

Kyle McEntee:

I think the annoying part of that for the employees is understandable. But to me, that's not necessarily because you're a lawyer, but that's because HR's job is to protect company. And so they may look at you as a lawyer and think of that as the excuse for why they're annoyed with you. Fundamentally, that's what your job is. It's to protect company.

Seret Gonzales:

I think in a startup context, that is when it becomes the most annoying to them to a certain extent because they're benefiting from the fact that you have that legal background because it's enabling them to move quickly with decisions because you're able to quickly give them an assessment of their plans. But it also puts that conservative flair to their entrepreneurial spirit and kills some ideas before they have the opportunity to reach fruition.

Kyle McEntee:

So how do you build your trust with those individuals to let them know that you're not actually trying to stomp out their ideas, that you in fact are entrepreneurial by nature as well and want to be a good business partner? What are your strategies that you're employing?

Seret Gonzales:

Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of it is transparency and communications. I'm just saying exactly that, “I understand what you want to accomplish. I want to help you accomplish those goals. But at the same time, I want to protect the company and protect you in the process of doing that.” And giving them the hypothetical situation of what the outcome could be or referring to past experiences where similar things have happened. And then ultimately, I'm only there to advise. Ultimately, it's their decision to choose to follow my guidance or not. For the most part, I'm lucky that they do. But you're there to guide the company.

Kyle McEntee:

That guidance, and whether it's compulsory or whether it's suggestive, depends on who you're talking to also. When you're talking management, yeah, it's suggestive. But when you're talking to the new hire, it's a little different, right?

Seret Gonzales:

It's a little more direct. It varies on the different types of aspects of the job that we're talking about. If we're talking about compliance issues, which I have compliance issues for many states, then it's a little more mandatory and this is what you have to do because these are the laws in these states. If it's more of a business strategic matter, then it's less authoritative and more suggestive.

Kyle McEntee:

Even as an HR professional, you can't get away from it. It depends, right?

Seret Gonzales:

You still can't. I mean, I try. I mean, I'm pretty direct and say, “this is what I would do if I were in the situation.” But ultimately, it depends.

Kyle McEntee:

You mentioned state-by-state differences. How many different states are your employees in?

Seret Gonzales:

We're in about 23 different states. We have a couple of employees in other countries, and then we have a number of consultants.

Kyle McEntee:

23 and multiple countries is enough to be stressful?

Seret Gonzales:

Yeah. With the other countries, we actually have a lot of people who have partnerships with employer records. They help us a little bit with the guidance in terms of their laws. I could say, luckily, we're primarily hiring in one state right now, but that primarily is California, which is one of the more complicated states to deal with for labor and employment issues.

Kyle McEntee:

Are you doing any recruiting in Colorado?

Seret Gonzales:

We do, we do. Right now, it's more, I just have open avenues of recruiting. I'm not doing recruiting of passive candidates. I'm not attempting to find people intentionally in Colorado.

Kyle McEntee:

The reason I'm asking for listeners is because Colorado has these pay transparency laws, and that's some of what you have to deal with, right?

Seret Gonzales:

You have to transition your communications with candidates based on that. We're moving into the direction of making it transparent company-wide, but we're not there yet. When you're talking to people in targeted areas, make sure you're covering what those laws are. You have to quickly adapt to the laws of the state that you're working with.

Kyle McEntee:

I think pay transparency laws, they're evolving somewhat rapidly, just like privacy laws are. How are you keeping up to date with these changes?

Seret Gonzales:

I'm part of different organizations, networking groups. I'm part of a remote HR networking group. I'm connected to a number of resources on places like LinkedIn. I maintain my law license, so I take CLE classes on a regular basis, continuing legal education courses.

Kyle McEntee:

Can you give an example of how these changes affect what you actually do?

Seret Gonzales:

For the labor and employment, for example, I had to change a whole bunch of letters for employees who were based in California, because it turns out that you can no longer use non-competes in the language at all. We used to just include it in an agreement and just let California, and some other states (it's not just California), let them know that they weren't subject to it. But you can't actually have that language in the agreement at all, so we had to send a whole bunch of letters out to everyone in California. Or the other thing, we wanted to move into unlimited PTO. Then you've got PTO laws that are different in every state, and you have to somehow figure out how to manage the past PTO before you're talking about doing an unlimited PTO.

Kyle McEntee:

What do those conversations look like when the company is trying to decide, should we have unlimited or should we stick with our definite period of PTO?

Seret Gonzales:

Conversations with leadership, where you're basically showing the pros and the cons of both. A lot of the times you're talking about what competitors are actually offering and what it takes to attract new talent, and then getting their agreement, and then doing a whole assessment of each state and how that's going to affect us.

Kyle McEntee:

There is no typical day for an HR professional, but what sort of things are you doing on that day-to-day basis?

Seret Gonzales:

I'm recruiting, I'm reviewing resumes, I'm screening candidates, I am talking to current employees about their health benefits-related issues, or their 401k, or I'm dealing with employee relations issues. I may have to do an investigation, an internal investigation on someone. I am dealing with performance reviews and mid-year reviews. I am working through stop option grants. I'm preparing for board meetings that are upcoming. So, I do a little bit of all of the aspects of HR, so it keeps it varied, but it keeps it busy.

When I was doing legal recruiting, it was very narrow. I was doing one thing. When I was doing immigration and labor law, it was pretty narrow too, because I was representing clients, not really representing one client. This gives me the opportunity to read best practices and to actually implement them. It's exciting to see your creativity put into work and actually utilized by a company.

Kyle McEntee:

Also, given the size, you probably are also having to be creative on all these policies. You are the office of one. It's on you to figure out which policies should you have. How do you implement them? How do you talk about them? How do you get feedback?

Seret Gonzales:

Yeah, and we get the feedback. We get the implementations. There are some policies we've put in when it was a financially successful time, and then some that we've taken away to be more on the conservative end of things. I think that's another key to it.

The same way that I try to have the open dialogue with leadership, I try to have that same open dialogue with employees. They may, in fact, complain about a policy or so forth. It may rise to the point that I'll bring it to the CEO's attention or I'll bring it to leadership's attention. No guarantees that it's going to be changed, but there's at least that possibility.

Kyle McEntee:

Looking back to your experience in immigration, client interviews are extremely important and gathering information. Is that where you learned how to communicate well with people and listen and understand maybe what's not being said, or did you develop that in some other way?

Seret Gonzales:

I think I probably learned more so in legal recruiting than I did in practicing law, interestingly enough. I think in practicing law, I learned how to communicate with clients and not oversell and not overpromise. In communicating with candidates, looking for a job is a very sensitive area.

I think I had to learn how to deal with different personalities more so, especially where people think that your job is to get them a job. The interaction sometimes doesn't flow as naturally and politely as you'd like it to.

Kyle McEntee:

Speaking of things that people come to you for that maybe are not your exact responsibility, are you finding that people, knowing that you're a lawyer, are coming to you and asking you questions about the law?

Seret Gonzales:

They do, and they do take advantage of the fact that I have a law degree and will try to push the envelope and get me to do other things. Right now, I'm in an options world where I'm figuring things out from an options perspective, grant options. They do, but I think in general, they're respectful.

When I applied for this job, I applied as an HR director and not as a lawyer. Generally, they're respectful of those boundaries, but I also try where I can to provide that extra assistance. If I think I can do a quick research on a specific subject and provide them, although I always put a caveat in there that I think you might want to talk to an actual outside counsel to cover this.

Kyle McEntee:

When you are talking to outside counsel, are you telling them that you have a background as a lawyer?

Seret Gonzales:

Generally speaking, I don't go into any conversation saying I'm a lawyer. It just comes out in the conversations for one reason or the other. Sometimes it's because you're communicating with someone and they're speaking down to you, and you kind of want to level things out.

Sometimes it's because the attorney is trying to persuade you that it should be this way, and you know for a fact that it could be another way, which I've had happen too. So it usually comes out in conversations, but I don't really offer it. I'm not hiding it either.

Kyle McEntee:

We recently had someone on the show who practiced law, and then left to go work for an insurance company and wanted to work in the corporate environment, and then decided they wanted to go back to law practice. You have worked on multiple jobs in the HR sphere. What is it about that kind of role that's really kept you there and not made you look backwards and say, I think I want to go back to representing clients in a legal setting?

Seret Gonzales:

That's a good question. I think I found a passion within HR itself. And as it's expanded, I mean, my career started off as a talent recruiter and then evolved into professional development for lawyers and then evolved. So it's continuously evolving. It's grown more expansive, and it's given me the ability to actually be creative with my work, where I think sometimes it's limiting as an attorney to have that same creativity. I don't view my role as an adversarial type of role, which is another thing that I did not like about practicing law.

I think also I found the right type of company, I want to say. Like, I have worked for large companies, I've worked for small companies, and then I enjoy the startup company because it gives me that great deal of space to actually create and build. So that's what keeps me interested. It's the evolving nature of my career, and it's still evolving as the workforce grows. From working in offices to more of a remote setting, it's transitioned and changed the job and responsibilities as well.