Measuring the ROI of Talent: A Conversation with Melanie Blaine, Director, Human Capital at LLR Partners

Every private equity firm aims to make smart investments. But it’s rarer for a private equity firm to invest in recruiting talent on behalf of its portfolio companies. That’s not the case with LLR Partners. The Philadelphia-based firm sets itself apart by employing a dedicated team to spearhead talent initiatives. LLR Partners believes that, by providing highly skilled resources to help portcos make better hires, it can help drive innovation and growth – and the firm can measure the ROI of its talent investment to prove it.

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We sat down with Melanie Blaine, Director, Human Capital at LLR Partners, during a recent webinar to get a closer look at how LLR Partners helps its portfolio of 50 healthcare and technology companies with recruiting. She has a lot of expertise: When compared to other private equity firms with a similar portfolio size, LLR Partners ranks in the top 25% of Getro customers for job board engagement. Melanie shared the strategies she favors and the metrics she tracks to get those results.

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A Dedicated Team for Talent

Twelve years ago, LLR launched a Value Creation Team that would focus solely on assisting its portcos. “We are the internal team at the firm that spends 100% of our time focused on our portfolio companies to support and help accelerate growth as it relates to each company’s investment thesis,” explains Melanie. “The goal has always been and will be, what services can we offer our portcos that are going to help drive impact and success against their goals?”

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Talent has been a focus for the team since the beginning. “Companies often struggle to grow unless they have the right talent in place and, in many cases, companies at the scale of our portcos have lean HR organizations and usually no dedicated recruiter,” says Melanie.

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Melanie and her team prioritize Executive and Board level searches, but they use Getro to help with hiring at every level and to add value through staff-level recruitment. With Getro, LLR Partners is able to maintain a job board that showcases every open position across their portfolio, making it easy to promote in-demand jobs and find talent. The job board updates automatically and allows introductions to happen naturally. 

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The Metrics to Measure the ROI of Talent Initiatives

Melanie spends a lot of time and energy promoting LLR Partners’ job board, and she uses Getro to dig into the data and understand the impact of her efforts. “I'm very excited to have data at my fingertips,” says Melanie. “We’ve been able to figure out what’s been working and what hasn’t been working.”

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These are some of the metrics that the partners at the firm look at to measure the ROI of talent. 

• Unique Visitors - Measuring unique visitors can help establish how many people are viewing your portco’s open roles. “This year we’ve brought over 5,000 new people to view our job board,” says Melanie. 
• Job Clicks - By analyzing job clicks, you can learn which listings are the most popular. “We’ve found that finance and accounting roles tend to be the most popular on our platform. We’re not overly surprised by this!” says Melanie. 
• Likely Applied - This metric, launched for Getro’s Impact Dashboard in June 2023, showcases the number of applicants who were likely to have completed an application on a portco’s website.  “We love this feature! This is what gets our portfolio leaders, LPs and partners most excited because we can see that we are driving traffic to some of these hard-to-fill roles. We’ve brought in almost 400 applicants to portfolio positions since June via the Getro platform,” says Melanie. 
• Job Alert Subscribers - Tracking subscriber preferences helps tailor content to meet an audience's needs by understanding what job seekers want to see. 

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“We found Getro to be a very appealing tool to allow us to share and promote job postings of all open roles across the portfolio since we are a very talent-focused team. Getro also allows us to help all of our companies at once through job board promotion, versus running an executive search process which is very one-on-one,” says Melanie.

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How LLR Partners Spreads the Word about Open Roles

LLR Partners has adopted a multi-pronged strategy that gets more talent into the pipeline across its portfolio, and the strategy has been a success. The firm’s high job board engagement places it in the top 25% of Getro private equity customers with a similar portfolio size. Melanie attributes their achievement to a well-rounded, all-hands-on-deck approach to talent. “We bring the whole firm in on helping promote and spread the word of the job board,” says Melanie. 

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Here are some of the channels Melanie uses for job board promotion:

• Email Signatures - “Many of my colleagues at the firm have the job board linked in their email signature,” says Melanie.
• Website and Email Campaigns - LLR Partners has its Getro Jobs board linked on its website and in the footer of its GrowthBits content email template to help visitors find jobs at portcos. 
• LinkedIn - Melanie explains her LinkedIn strategy in detail: “We utilize it in a few ways. I post twice a month and then ask other members of the team to share my posts. Staying consistent with these is important. We also comment with the job board when we see people in our network who have posted about layoffs or reductions in force. We have monthly posts from LLR’s LinkedIn account that has over 15,000 followers. We then ask everyone on the team to reshare this in their own post.” 
• MBA Programs - “We have relationships with a few top MBA programs across the country and have been lucky enough to partner with some of these schools on finding a permanent spot for our job board on their careers site, which alumni and current MBA students have access to,” says Melanie.

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Investing in Talent for Future Success

LLR Partners’ achievements are a testament to the power of investing in talent to drive innovation and growth. The firm has formed a team dedicated to hiring initiatives, created a dynamic job board with Getro, measured the ROI of talent with key metrics, and implemented a thoughtful promotion strategy – all of which have had a significant impact on its portfolio companies’ ability to hire great talent. The future is bright for the firm, its portcos, and the job seekers that may find their next career opportunity among its portfolio’s open roles. 

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Want to learn more about how boosting your fund's talent strategy? Sign up for our next webinar: Drive DEI in Your Talent Strategy featuring Kapor Capital's Hilliary Turnipseed, Colorwave's John Roussel, General Catalyst's Grant Rivas, and Sixty8 Capital's Nassir Criss.