Jensen Partners

Jensen Partners is a leading global executive search firm that leverages data analytics to offer innovative solutions to alternative asset management firms alongside Jensen DiversityMetrics™, the enterprise software solution for workforce diversity, equity and inclusion. The firms, led by founder and CEO Sasha Jensen, utilize proprietary data to recruit top candidates, provide insight into workforce trends, and accelerate DE&I progress across the entire alternative investment industry.

“Jensen Partners, a certified women-owned business, has operated for more than a decade guided by the principle that data driven insights enable more informed decision-making and greater outcomes for both firms and their investors,” Sasha Jensen, the Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Jensen Partners.

Jensen Partners is revolutionizing human capital procurement in the alternative investment industry, providing firms with the ability to simultaneously advance the quality of their workforce and build more inclusive, representative workplaces. In the firm’s formative years, Sasha and her team recognized that diverse teams produce better results and predicted that to remain competitive in the quest for talent and capital, managers would need to actively prioritize diversity in their hiring and recruitment programs.

Jensen Partners focused its platform on the hiring of marketing and distribution professionals, the group of fundraisers that helped grow the alternative investment industry from just $5.6 trillion in AUM in 2012, to over $13 trillion in 2021. As the industry grew, so did Jensen Partners, evolving into a business partner that had unique insight into the hiring trends and practices shaping the alternative investment industry, and developing best practices to attract and retain qualified, diverse talent.

A great deal has changed since 2020, both in the way alternative asset management firms work and how they approach building their workforces. Like so many others across the country, Sasha and her team viewed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the ensuing social justice reckoning that took place across the United States as a critical inflection point in the push to advance DE&I . As organizations responded to calls for greater equality, announcing intentions to address representation by advancing more equitable hiring practices, Jensen Partners set out to demonstrate that real progress and equitable representation require more than just good intentions. Sasha and Jensen Partners was firm in their belief that an empirical solution was needed for clients to make real, tangible progress and establish both internal and external accountability.

The firm had been collecting human capital data analogously since 2012 which gave them unique insight into the state of diversity across the industry and led to the founding of Jensen DiversityMetrics™, the first enterprise software solution that enables analysis of recruitment and retention strategies, identification of areas of representative improvement, and development of always-on diverse talent pipelines.

This data-driven approach has positioned Jensen Partners as a leader in the recruitment space, revealing inequities across workforces and providing tangible solutions to address them.

In the years following the murder of George Floyd, workforce diversity has become a requirement for alternative asset managers who are hoping to attract and retain top candidates and secure investments. The data and insight Jensen Partners provides helps their clients move past casual claims about diversity initiatives by identifying where they should target their efforts and allocate resources, as well as define a reasonable timeline to accomplish their goals.

Jensen DiversityMetrics™ also provides institutional investors the power to measure diversity at various firms to ensure they are awarding money to organizations that are representative of those for whom they will be investing.

The executive search firm employs a team of data scientists that take a scientific approach to tracking and sourcing candidates, leveraging an organigramme mapping system that visualizes entire distribution and investment teams based on general and portfolio management performance reports.

Sasha and her team offer a unique array of services to clients, ranging from investment and distribution executive search to various auditing and evaluation strategies. Through their Diversity Platform Audit, the firm is able to measure diversity metrics across an entire asset management firm, providing the transparency necessary to hold the industry accountable.

Jensen Partners has an extensive network of connections across asset classes which allow them to build detailed profiles through direct feedback from limited and general partners who have worked with any candidate over the course of their career.

Their unique 360 Investor Referencing™ methodology uses qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze a candidate’s asset-raising capabilities by tracking the full asset-raising history of a candidate across their career. This, coupled with a behavioral analysis that provides insight into work style and approach, allows Jensen Partners to provide incredibly detailed, thorough, and in depth profiles of candidates to their clients

Case Study

Jensen DiversityMetrics™ has allowed clients to move beyond baseless claims about workforce diversity by introducing software that creates concrete goals and presents actionable solutions. The platform’s immediate success led Jensen Partners to announce an industry first: a commitment to diverse recruitment that guaranteed that all future searches conducted by the firm would begin with a candidate pool comprised of at least 51 percent candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

By leveraging data to improve the workforce across the alternative asset management industry, Jensen Partner’s staffs, led by an 80 percent female leadership team, has made systematic and quantitative decision-making a reality for their clients in a historically data-starved industry.

The demand for more transparency and accountability is set to increase as the alternative investment industry, traditionally exempt from reporting DE&I data, receives increased pressure to disclose their progress on advancing diversity and inclusion to investors.

Jensen Partners’ deep insight into talent markets has made them a necessary partner to many of the industry’s biggest players. Uniquely positioned to drive the future of representation across alternative asset classes, Sasha and her team are armed with the data and insight to make tangible progress possible for clients.