The Global Head of Portfolio Valuations had built a team of valuations professionals that had grown organically but did not reflect the firm’s drive for DE&I. As they sought a seasoned VP level valuations professional to report to the Head of the team,  it was important for them to find a diversity candidate for the role. They were not, however, willing to lower the bar for quality. They are in office and in the Bay Area so they needed to find someone local or willing to relocate. These factors kept the pool of viable talent quite small and concentrated in one area.  After several weeks of internal efforts to attract the appropriate talent through personal networks, job posting, etc. they were unable to find an appropriately strong candidate for the role.

The ideal candidate for this role would likely come out of another VC or PE firm that was large enough to have an in-house, hands on, valuations team. Below a certain size most firms are outsourcing the actual valuation work to a third party consulting firm. This person could also, reasonably come from one of the major valuation consulting firms as well. 

The consulting firms in the space however, vary greatly in quality and in what the broader skill set is they gain in the role. In addition to the hands on skill set the ideal candidate would have the soft skills to interact with portfolio companies, internal leadership and to manage more junior team members. As a constantly evolving company they would require someone with the ability to build efficient processes and automation where possible. This wasn’t just about valuing the portfolio but playing a strategic leadership role in the team.

We began by listing all the major PE/VC firms in the bay area and determining who in each of those firms was leading the Portfolio Valuations function, then determine who was in their team that was of the appropriate seniority.  Using traditional resources such as LinkedIn and other websites we were often able to determine if they fit the diversity requirement but fairly often we needed to connect and actually speak with them. 

After mapping out the teams of the obvious PE/VC firms we shifted to the much larger pool of talent coming from consulting firms; these would include the big 4 consultants (PWC, Deloitte, EY, KPMG) as well as the large regionals operating in the area like RSM and Grant Thornton. Lastly, we would target the valuations specific firms such as Duff & Phelps/Kroll, Stout and others. 

In this case we had to build an unusually large pool of talent in order to have a large enough slate of diversity candidates present to build out a strong long list. Because that was such a small percentage of the total we had to make every effort to connect with every single one of them however we could. Several of those candidates took a full 9 contact points to respond and either self select out or take the time for us to assess them. 

In the end we were able to identify, assess, and present a short list of 4 very strong diversity candidates with varied backgrounds.  The final hire came was a Berkeley grad in Economics who had grown up in KPMG’s Economic Valuations business, where she was promoted several times and had gained a breadth of experience across different types of asset valuations as well as the client facing and advising experience that equipped her for the role.