How to leverage your network to get an interview

Leveraging your network to actually land an interview

Congratulations, you actually read all of my posts! You now either feel like you’re more informed on the recruiting process and ready to execute, or you feel like I’ve already wasted enough of your time and you might as well finish the series out.

Assuming the former, by this point you’ll have built preliminary relationships with investors and have had follow up conversations with them about your thesis. But what you’re told happens next and what actually happens next are two different things.

Many existing investors will say that now that you’ve established relationships beyond a first meeting, you’ll be top of mind and can expect to wait for the interview referrals to start flowing.

Sadly, that’s not at all how it goes down! As much as it hurts for us to admit, the reality is that we’ll never be top of mind for working venture capitalists. They simply have more important things to think about. So, what does that mean? It means our work isn’t done yet, fam.

Finding open roles and back channeling into them

So, if the interviews aren’t going to just start flowing, what do we do? Here’s the move:

First, you Scour LinkedIn and newsletters, like John Gannon and Accelerated, for open roles to be posted.

Then, you find someone in your network (that you’ve now spent time developing) who can connect you with someone at the firm that’s hiring.

And finally, you have a conversation with that person at your target firm about all the same things you talk about in a first meeting/coffee chat— but this time you end it by mentioning that you’d love to be considered for the job.

That’s pretty much it. In these conversations you should be able to talk about everything you’ve learned about venture and offer up your point of view on an exciting investment area (i.e. talk about your thesis). You’ll absolutely crush it.