Should VCs and startups add blind review to their hiring toolkit?

By Michael Campos, Lauren Hartle, and Amy Duffuor

As early-stage venture capitalists, one of our key jobs is talent scouting. Like many in climate tech, we’re grappling with the community’s skewed demographics, including who receives investment, writes checks, and gets carried interest. This is important: as a climate-focused community, we have a responsibility to represent the perspectives of those most affected by climate change. As a startup community, we have an opportunity to diversify teams from the beginning. We’re serious about building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive firm and portfolio; as talent scouts, it’s clear that it’s both the right thing and the smart thing to do.

However, most of our five-member investment team comes from dominant identity groups. We don’t hire new investment team members often, and like many VCs and startups, we don’t have an HR team. It begs the question: how can we put our values into practice?

Blind review: an experiment in bias reduction

We decided to run an experiment in blind review of resumes and cover letters – a tool increasingly utilized to mitigate unconscious bias – to see if it influenced the kinds of candidates we interviewed. We started with our most frequent hires: interns, who work with the investment team on scouting, due diligence, and investment thesis development. We realized that we could launch a “minimum viable product” built on top of a standard application and interview process we already used. From there, we could analyze the results and make iterative improvements.

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