Why hiring great talent for a VC fund can be just as hard as picking the next great startup
Today, I’m excited to announce that Eric Ong is joining Lightbank. Eric joins us from the west coast where he spent the last 2 years as a TMT investment banker at Deutsche Bank and returns to Chicago after going to Northwestern for his undergraduate degree. Eric is extremely impressive in all senses of the word (academically, professionally and personally) and we couldn’t be happier to have him join us after a long and exhaustive search. How long and exhaustive? I first tweeted about the opening in early July, but we had already been selectively looking at candidates at that point. Since then, we’ve received north of 700 applications, interviewed dozens of candidates and ultimately decided on Eric. Fortunately, he accepted the position. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly a 0.1% acceptance rate.
The problem with people like Eric, however, is that they are extremely hard to recruit. Chicago is an amazing city, but it can be challenging to attract top-tier folks to Chicago when so many recent graduates are wooed by the Bay Area and New York. This doubles the difficulty of hiring great talent by requiring us to not only find great applicants, but break through the noise of other firms to bring them on board.
Collectively, I’d estimate that I spent north of 100 hours on the process and there were dozens of hours spent by nearly every member of our team in order to get to this single hire. Why spend so much time on a single hire? Because folks like Eric represent our brand and what we are trying to accomplish as a fund. We are an extremely lean team and everyone on the team has a single ambition — building THE leading platform for investing, building and supporting game-changing startups. Eric shared that ambition and we knew that he would have a major impact on our efforts from the day he joined. Most venture firms share that same degree of perfection for hiring, which is why firms like Glocap have been able to build sizeable businesses assisting VC firms with the process, despite our job category being one of smallest, most finite labor categories possible. The fact of the matter is that hiring still sucks, which is why so many organizations outsource the process to 3rd party recruitment agencies like Robert Half, Spencer Stuart and Michael Page and are equally willing to pay placement fees in excess of 30% of a candidate’s first year salary.
Unsurprisingly, startups are attacking these institutions. We actually used several of these services to examine candidates, but ultimately came across Eric through one of our former interns. I’d estimate that 95% of our applicants came through our job posting or through 3rd party services, so I was somewhat surprised to see our final candidate come through a random email. It’s for that reason that hiring for a VC firm isn’t all that different from your own investment process — you never know where the best ones are going to come from.
We’re still looking for amazing candidates that fit our vision for a truly disruptive start-up platform so please apply if you are interested in joining our team.
PS — For founders looking for funding from Lightbank, our Associates are a great way to connect with our firm. I highly recommend reading this piece via Jason Lemkin on why VC associates are critically important influencers in the VC process.
