Cornell Alpha Fund got its time back and found better analysts because of it.

Cornell Alpha Fund is not a typical student club. As one of the few student-managed investment funds at Cornell that deploys real capital and conducts genuine investment research, Alpha Fund holds its recruitment process to a standard that most campus organizations never approach. Each semester, hundreds of students apply for a handful of analyst positions, a process that demands both intellectual rigor and genuine community fit.

With acceptance rates in the low single digits, every candidate deserves thoughtful, substantive evaluation. And every minute that Alpha Fund’s leadership spends on logistics is a minute not spent doing exactly that.

The Challenge

Leadership was managing process instead of meeting people.

Jason Orenstein had been through the recruitment cycle before. He knew how it went: the weeks leading up to decisions consumed in Google Form configuration, manual candidate tracking, inbox chaos as coffee chat confirmations bounced back and forth, and then a frantic sprint to consolidate feedback before deliberations.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Alpha Fund recruits students for their ability to make high-quality investment decisions under pressure. But the decision-making process the club used internally, for its own recruitment, was anything but high quality. It was chaotic, inconsistent, and dependent on whoever was managing the spreadsheet at any given moment.

Members had trouble comparing candidates across rounds because feedback wasn’t standardized. Coffee chats were logistical ordeals. And by the time the final deliberations came around, the Co-Presidents were mentally exhausted. Not from the hard thinking, but from the administrative overhead that shouldn’t have been hard at all.

Discovering Delibity

The right tool, at exactly the right moment.

When Jason first heard about Delibity, the pitch resonated immediately. A platform specifically designed for student organizations that run structured, competitive recruitment cycles. Not a repurposed Airtable or a stitched-together Google Workspace setup, but an end-to-end system purpose-built for exactly what Alpha Fund needed.

What won him over wasn’t any single feature. It was the combination: coffee chat auto-pairing that would eliminate the most painful logistics, evaluation forms that standardized how members submitted feedback, and candidate transcripts that gave everyone a unified view without anyone needing to build the spreadsheet.

He brought it to the Executive Board. The reception was unanimous. They signed up the same day.

Implementation

From enrolled to operational in one sitting.

Setup was straightforward enough that Jason and his co-president had Alpha Fund fully operational on Delibity within a single afternoon. They enrolled the organization, uploaded the fund’s member list, and configured their recruitment stages across the platform: first round coffee chats, technical interviews, case presentations, and final deliberations.

The coffee chat pairing feature immediately delivered. Candidates submitted their availability; Delibity matched them with fund members and fired off confirmation emails automatically. What had previously meant a full evening of back-and-forth coordination took under ten minutes.

For interview evaluations, members submitted scores and qualitative notes through standardized forms generated dynamically for each round. Notes were structured, consistent, and attached instantly to each candidate’s transcript, which the entire fund membership could view in real time.

That last part mattered more than Jason expected. When members could see the full picture of every candidate, including application answers, coffee chat notes, interview evaluations, and event attendance, discussions became richer and decisions came faster. Everyone was working from the same information.

Results

Better decisions. Happier members. A stronger class.

Alpha Fund’s members didn’t just tolerate the new system. They embraced it. The platform made it easy for every member, from first-years to seniors, to engage meaningfully in the recruitment process. Candidate profiles that used to live scattered across spreadsheets and email threads were now unified, searchable, and immediately readable.

The outcome was a recruitment cycle that felt, for the first time, proportionate to the quality of the organization running it. Alpha Fund didn’t just find great candidates. It found them faster, with more confidence, and with a process that every member was proud to put their name behind.

Looking Forward

A platform the fund plans to grow into.

Jason was unambiguous when asked about next semester: Alpha Fund will be back on Delibity. The past cycle’s data, including applications, evaluation forms, rubrics, and candidate transcripts, is all preserved and ready to inform the next cohort selection.

For a fund that prides itself on continuous learning and iterative improvement, having a complete record of past decisions and the framework to analyze them is itself a competitive advantage. The next leadership team won’t start from zero. They’ll start from where Alpha Fund left off.