More talent partners spent more time running searches for portfolio companies in 2023 than the year prior. This stat is self-reported (from True Search’s 2023 Venture Capital & Private Equity Talent Partner Survey), and worth double-clicking on. While the average amount of time spent on executing executive searches for the portfolio stayed flat year-over-year, we took a second look at time allocation by talent partner and plotted the findings on a distribution curve. What’d we find as a result? While a talent partner’s time allocation for running searches still looks similar in shape to 2022, there was a marked decline—nearly 15 raw percentage points—in the number of partners spending less than 10% of their time running searches. That change meant more talent partners were spending more time running searches, even if it is still just a single part of the job. Though limited in nature to VC/PE talent partners, this self-reported change in time allocation appears to be a quantifiable sign of what we’ve been hearing: The bar for sending searches to search firms has gotten higher. In our 2023 year in review—due out next month—we’ll explore this dynamic and what we’ve seen in our data.