If you’re working at a VC fund, chances are you’ve been in your industry for a long time and have amassed a vast professional network in the process. You and each of your colleagues likely has hundreds, if not thousands, of professional contacts. What’s more, you and each person on your team are meeting new people all the time and expanding your fund’s network.

Trust transference

All of those contacts add up to a powerful pool of talent, the kind that founders dream of accessing. When founders accept funding from you, they’re looking for more than just financing. They want the connections that you can provide, as those introductions allow them to make stronger, longer-lasting hires than they could make on their own. Referred employees produce 135% more profit than non-referred employees, and they’re 30% less likely to quit their jobs.

This can be explained, at least in part, by a phenomenon known as “trust transference.” Several studies have shown trust can develop through a "transference process," whereby trust easily transfers from one trusted "proof source" (in this case, you: a professional contact at a VC fund) to other related individuals or groups with which the trustor has had little or no prior experience or interactions. The studies usually show how trust transference influences sales – namely, that it increases closing ratio and total sales volume – but the same concept applies to recruiting.

How investors can leverage trust transference

Most early-stage companies lack brand recognition, and job seekers are reluctant to have a cold conversation with a company they don’t know and trust. This can present a significant roadblock for the early-stage companies in your portfolio that are trying to recruit for key roles.

VC funds are seen as “market mavens,” trusted by nearly everyone in their network. Founders and hiring managers trust you because you have a vested interest in helping their company succeed, and job seekers trust you because you have insider knowledge and can often help them skip the formal application process.

As an investor, you’re the bridge of trust between job seeker and founder. You can help your portfolio companies overcome their hiring struggles by getting the elite job seekers in your network to apply at a company they’ve never heard of before.

How Getro helps investors make better introductions

Despite this, VC funds aren’t optimizing the number of introductions they make.  Often it’s because current processes get in the way. Take, for example, how a Head of Platform might help a portfolio company source a new sales lead. She sends an email to the fund’s partners asking if they know anyone, and hopes that one of them can supply a name. She’ll need to follow up with each partner individually, and if any of them can come up with a recommendation, it’ll likely be from the top of their head.

She might also dig through a spreadsheet of contacts that is hard to search, incomplete, and out of date, all to scrounge together a handful of names that barely scratches the surface of her fund’s extended network. She then needs to compile a list for her portfolio company, after having wasted energy drumming up contacts instead of discussing why an individual might be a good match for an open role.

Getro’s newest product, GetroConnect, was created to help solve this problem. It’s based on the premise that, if this tedious introduction request process could be streamlined, it would lead to more introductions, ultimately allowing you to leverage your network at scale. Trust transference is a potent tool for recruiting, and GetroConnect makes it possible for every founder in your portfolio to benefit from its power.

How GetroConnect works

GetroConnect organizes and indexes the professional contacts of every person at your fund, creating a unified contact database that the entire team can use.

With GetroConnect, you no longer have to ask your colleagues to wrack their brains for a candidate, and can instead search a clean and intuitive repository created from LinkedIn, email, Airtable, and other easy-to-import sources. GetroConnect empowers you to take an active role in sourcing talent from your fund’s network. Platform teams can find candidates on their own, and use the results as a jumping off point for conferring with colleagues and making introductions.

Use GetroConnect to share your network with founders

Your fund’s network is one of your greatest assets. As an investor, you can help the unknown early-stage companies in your portfolio overcome their recruiting hurdles and hire a team that could change the trajectory of their entire business. But the status quo makes it too time consuming to make more than a handful of introductions a quarter. With GetroConnect, you can act on every possible opportunity to link a portfolio company with a star candidate from your fund’s network. When it comes to recruiting, Getro has a better way.

Don’t let your founders miss out on your network’s potential. Get a demo of GetroConnect today.