Update on 2020 Analyst Recruiting | Union Square Ventures
We are in the final stages of our first cut for our 2020 Analyst Program. The next stage is phone/video interviews for a subset of the applicants. We will be reaching out to those candidates over the next 2 weeks to set up early January appointments. We will also notify candidates that unfortunately will not continue in our process in this same time frame.
We are once again overwhelmed by the quality of applicants to our program. The pool was fairly evenly split between men and women and had some solid diversity though perhaps not as much as we would have hoped given how broadly we distributed the notice.
Our policy is to have at least 2 partners review each candidate and as of this morning we have achieved that goal. This round, we have been able to have up to 5 sets of eyes on a good number of candidates, giving us invaluable insights. The number of candidates we all agree should pass to the next phase is only a handful of candidates. Many candidates who will move forward may have had a combination of yes and no’s to moving forward from our team. We think this underlines how diverse the thinking is at USV, something we embrace.
Some fun facts:
Of the 340 applications, 60 were submitted in the final hour, 120 in the last 24 hours. Many of our finalists are in that final cohort.
We asked applicants to rate the valuation on 3 companies (Carta, Uber, Facebook) and Bitcoin. The results of those valuations are below. In general, this applicant pool is bullish overall with one exception, Uber where more folks argued it was overvalued than not.
We also asked applicants to tell us about a product they don’t like but they feel is working anyway. The single most frequent response was Linkedin followed by a variety of answers including Mint, a number of social media and messaging platforms and then a long list of business software. We had some super entertaining answers to this question including the toothbrush, headphones, the L train in Chicago and even an ice cream brand.
The next steps are to inform candidates of where they stand in our process (this will happen over the next 2 weeks) and then a set of phone/Zoom interviews will enable us to reduce the pool to a manageable level for in person interviews here at USV. We continue to plan for our new analysts can start with us between January and March.