Matan Hazanov says his firm gets 2,500 resumes for entry-level analyst jobs. He and a colleague discuss why venture capital and private equity attract so many young applicants, calling the industry "sexy" and comparing it to Shark Tank.
There is not a week that goes by without talented young people that want to break into venture capital and private equity. It looks very sexy on the outside, and it's a great industry, obviously, to be in, and you can make a lot of money. And, you know, it's just— it's become sexy, you know, Silicon Valley, the show, and Shark Tank. It's like, oh, I'd love to be a shark and just criticize people and make money off their labor. I mean, it sounds like a great job, right?
I hope people don't view that's what I do.
But yes, you said something pretty wild. When you look for an analyst, you said you got 2,500 resumes, and I assume these are quality resumes. These aren't just random people from Indeed or something. Like, you're going after top talent here. So just walk us through, like, how do you even filter for that? Like, what does that process look like?
And just clarify, we got 2,500 resumes in a week and then we had to shut it off. So like, that's how— to your point earlier, I think there's a lot of demand where people want to get in this industry and there's very limited supply or job openings. There's a lot of other firms who will hire people that have done 2 years of banking or consulting or something. We tend to like to hire out undergrads. We can kind of train them into our philosophy and our underwriting style. And that's been a successful process for us. So right now I think we have 15 analysts or so. So given we hire right out of undergrad, let's just use the 2,500 number. We get an unbelievable amount of resumes. We have a talent team internally and they help both our portfolio companies hire as well as hire at Volition. They used to have to kind of sift through them and sometimes we divvy that up. It is so hard to differentiate from the unbelievable resumes that we get. A lot of us, you know, who are partners now joke that if we applied to Volition now, we would not get hired because the bar has been raised so much for how impressive so many of these resumes that we get are. Everyone has a 3.8 to a 4.0 GPA. That's like the standard. Like you gotta have over a 3.8 at this point. All of them have really impressive internships. I feel like everyone speaks multiple languages these days. Et cetera, et cetera. So ultimately what we're looking for is someone that has exceptionality in something. That could be— academics is harder, to be honest, because they're all exceptional in academics. So it's like something else. For some people, that's an instrument. For some people, that's sports. For other people, that could be the arts or photography. And just something that they have excelled at in their life that points to this is like someone that knows work ethic and will be gritty and a good analyst for us. So the way that we— so we kind of have fed that framework into an AI platform that helps us go from 2,500 down to 150. So now we're down to 150 and those are kind of manually reviewed. We have set up a hiring committee because this is one of the most important things we do is hire. We're in the people business. So all the partners are very involved in it. We have a hiring committee and a process where 2 people interview. We, you know, rank them based on some attributes that we think are important for the analyst role. If they pass that, they then come in for a super day where they meet the rest of the team.
