How Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital (IVC) Run an in-depth Human Capital Assessment on Companies with Osterus

Venture Capital firms aren’t just bottomless pockets of cash, they need to make their money back — and then some — to survive and create great ROI for their Investors. In order to do that they need to make smart investments. To make smart investments, they need to invest in great products and great people. Venture Capital firm IVC contracted Osterus to run our analysis on companies they were investing in as a form of due diligence. Using Osterus they were able to check that the team they were investing in were capable.

Gaining a competitive advantage when investing is tough. In order to gain it, IVC and other VCs will go through every data point they can with a fine tooth comb. Investors will quiz senior team members and founders on their business acumen and pull apart their plans. The one point that is always left languishing is an analysis of the rest of the employees. It’s easy for a VC to spend time interviewing 2–3 senior team members, but they can’t be expected to interview 20+ employees or read through their CV’s and benchmark them against competitors.

Osterus is empowering IVC to back up their investment in people by using our software to benchmark the workforce against the competition. It takes a matter of minutes to fact check whether the knowledge and experience of a team match with their competition.

Osterus was used to do the following:

• Analyse and benchmark the workforce against the competition
• Gather direct insights into cost structures and the quality of life of their portfolios workforce
• Quickly compare a company’s workforce as part of their due-diligence process (were there any irregularities)
• Understand the internal growth of an organisation via their hiring and retention metrics
• Analytics to further understand the biases and preferences of companies hiring choices.
• Offering portfolio companies deep insights into the hiring strategy of competitors and scores e.g. Retention, Work-experience a strong benchmark to understand the Human Capital.

That’s why VCs and investors are turning to Osterus to do the legwork and benchmarking for them. Osterus can analyse hundreds of CVs in a matter of minutes. Our algorithm then finds patterns and clusters within company hires which can indicate areas of business focus, skill, duration of experience and more. Osterus can also use their data sources to estimate the cost of living and overall quality of life employees have in specific locations. This is key for investors to understand where their investment could be happiest. These factors enable investors to perform their own due diligence on employees and truly understand the competitiveness of the team they are investing in.

Below you’ll see a snippet of a report which shows the experience length and current job titles of employees from a company based in Berlin. The current job titles suggest a focus on research, however the vast majority of previous work experience is actually in web development, project management and IT. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it contradictory to the business, however it is important for investors to know.