Jensen DiversityMetrics™ allows alternative asset managers to quantify and qualify the intersectionality of race, class, and gender across the workforce.” - Sasha Jensen, CEO of Jensen Partners and Jensen DiversityMetrics™

Jensen Partners is a women-owned executive search and corporate advisory firm for the alternative investment management industry. Sasha Jensen founded Jensen Partners in 2011 and serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the company. Sasha also serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Jensen DiversityMetrics™ (JDM), an industry-first technology platform for measuring, reporting, and improving DEI.

The Silicon Review reached out to Sasha Jensen, CEO of Jensen DiversityMetrics™, and here’s what she had to say.

Interview Highlights

Big data is the lifeblood of modern business and a crucial resource for driving smart decision-making. Please reason with us about how data drives and scales your business.

Our flagship platform Jensen DiversityMetrics™ (JDM) leverages a unique data set of more than 25,000 investment and distribution professionals, including 8,000 who self-identify as having a diverse background across more than 100,000 positions. We harness that data to help firms benchmark against competitors, analyze hiring and retention practices, identify biases in workplace cultures, and report progress to investors. Furthermore, JDM has noted more than 14,000 marketing moves across the alternative investment industry since 2012, allowing managers to find the best talent and make the best recommendations.

Put simply, JDM enables client success by providing access to previously untapped talent pools while simultaneously building relationship networks of candidates from diverse backgrounds.

Q. What can you tell us about Jensen Partners’ executive recruiting model? How robust is it?

Jensen Partners runs a highly differentiated business model. Due to our niche focus within the alternative asset management industry, we know our market in its entirety. Furthermore, our data-driven approach, which includes market mapping and trend analysis, is highly appealing to our clients in an increasingly data-intensive environment. The Jensen team begins all searches with a pool of at least 51% of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. The diverse recruitment pledge is one of several initiatives Jensen Partners has created to help alternative asset managers make meaningful DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) progress.

The unique recruiting model of Jensen Partners and JDM allows the firm to build relationships with clients based on trust and transparency while providing access to long-term human capital data. This model has allowed substantial global growth across asset management in multiple strategies, including Private Equity, Private Credit, and Hedge Funds resulting in investment from JB Capital, positioning the firm for even faster growth and scale into 2023 and beyond.

Q. How revolutionary is your proprietary 360° Investor Referencing™ methodology, and how does it work in favor of your clients?

The Jensen DiversityMetrics™ portal enables institutional investors such as pension funds to incorporate diversity and inclusion in their manager selection process. It is the first human capital portal to offer one-click diversity and inclusion reports, index scores relating to representation and inclusion, and peer & industry rankings.

As institutional investors expect more information about how a firm approaches diversity and inclusion initiatives and workforce metrics, asset management leaders face the challenge of showing how they promote diversity and inclusion at their firms and in their portfolios. JDM enables asset managers to lead with diversity and inclusion as a differentiator in their investment strategy. The Referencing methodology is a differentiator because we rely on our extensive relationship network with LPs and GPs to holistically assess candidates’ capital-raising capabilities.

The visualization portal diagnoses diversity and inclusion pain points. It identifies competitive advantages of specific team structures by dimensions of diversity, which in return creates a realistic diversity and inclusion improvement map. We enable our super users to hone in quickly on high-value opportunities and high-potential partnerships via our visualization tools and downloadable Scorecard. The Jensen Scorecards are downloadable reports that give high-level analysis of DEI workforce performance to be printed and included in RFPs and due diligence processes.

Q. How skilled is the Jensen Partners team of experts, and how do they bring value to the company?

Tallulah Tadlock, co-founder and Director of Product at Jensen DiversityMetrics™, is responsible for running a team of data analysts. Tallulah and the JDM team of 12 data scientists continually build on nearly a decade worth of data as they compile the latest anonymized, intersectional demographic data. Together, they analyze the range and commitment to diversity across every competitor intelligence market map produced at the firm. This end-to-end data analytics and visualization platform assesses and measures diversity and inclusion at all front office functions of each asset management firm, thus holding each firm accountable to commit to diversity.

Q. Tell us more about Jensen DiversityMetrics™.

What began as a need-to-have advisory diversity, equity, and inclusion human capital data platform in 2020 for Jensen Partners to source diverse candidates, ensure they are represented in shortlists, and advise on DEI initiative has snowballed into its value-add product to institutional investors, asset managers, and their portfolio companies. In 2022, Jensen Partners launched the JDM client portal, which leverages diversity data and technology to bring visibility and insights into workforce performance, culture, and overall talent strategy.

The Jensen DiversityMetrics™ platform enables institutional investors to incorporate diversity and inclusion in their manager selection process by offering one-click diversity and inclusion reports, index scores relating to representation and inclusion, and peer and industry ranking. Overall, the outcome that JDM hopes to create is a more inclusive workforce across the industry.

Q. As a woman-owned business, how does Jensen Partners promote and preserve diversity and inclusion?

Our software platform, Jensen DiversityMetrics™, recognizes the importance of ensuring strong DEI across the financial services industry. We are committed to the promotion and placement of more diverse candidates, with the end goal of improving racial and gender disparities across the alternative investment industry.

Our proprietary platform allows alternative asset managers to quantify and qualify the intersectionality of race, class, and gender across the workforce. For firms within the alternative asset management industry, these data insights can be used to build diverse candidate pipelines, benchmark DEI metrics, follow DEI best practices, and ultimately drive meaningful progress toward DEI objectives.

 Q. What level of growth do you hope to see in the next five years?

Our mission is to continue to be at the forefront of human capital data solutions and be the golden seal of approval for actionable DEI data across the asset management industry and transform the future of workforces. The JDM platform is the first of many steps toward a more inclusive future. We hope in the next year to add a predictive layer to our client portal to enable our users to prevent turnover of top talent.

Q. Is there anything else you want us to highlight that we might have missed?

Using the Jensen DiversityMetrics™ platform, we found that white people accounted for 80% of the hires tracked during the first quarter of 2022. The alternative asset management industry has a long road ahead to becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Though DEI progress takes time, we remain steadfast in our mission to help our clients make meaningful progress toward a more inclusive future.

“Though DEI progress takes time, we remain steadfast in our mission to help our clients make meaningful progress toward a more inclusive future.”