Hi Mansi, thanks for reading the article and checking out Varsidee. A few things I would offer you to consider:

1. Our team actually is pretty diverse, even by legal standards. Out of 4 cofounders, 50% are over 40 (the “age” protected class), and the team breaks down into two religious affiliations (the “religious beliefs” protected class). On top of the legally protected classes, our team is operating out of 3 locations — the SF Bay area, Las Vegas, NV and Washington, DC — and has a lot of diversity in cultural and professional expertise: a career recruiter, a product/marketing professional, a biz dev guy from the legal vertical and a tech consultant. The main point of my article was that companies should NOT be seeking diversity for diversity’s sake, but that diversity will be the natural consequence of a hiring structure that optimizes for TALENT, and provides an equally available mechanism for everyone to demonstrate their talent. But we have to recognize that diversity is present in areas besides just skin color and gender. By building a hiring method like I describe you avoid bias because you strip out as much as possible the things that are biasing. It seems you may have simply looked at our pictures on the website and concluded “4 white males” without considering these other diverse aspects besides skin color or gender. That’s sort of what I was getting at in the article with the paragraph about names: they trigger biases. And pictures do too. You concluded based on our names and pictures that we or our product might be biased (*gasp*). I’m not trying to pick on you or be rude; just to make a point. We all have these unconcious biases, and it’s impossible to turn them off (even when we’ve just read an article that describes them ;) because it’s human nature. Your human nature just prompted a biased conclusion about our team. The unfortunate reality is the hiring process most companies use allows this human nature (and it’s biases) to be present throughout. That’s what we need to change.
2. At Varsidee we make software that allows hiring teams to create and publish job Tryouts. That’s it. We don’t actually create those Tryouts, just the software that powers them. Think of Facebook or Twitter or Salesforce. These companies simply make software that their users then populate with their own personal data. We operate in the same manner. Creating the Tryout is entirely up to the hiring team using our software, and that allows them to create one that will be most representative of their unique opportunity, the needs of the position they’re hiring for, their company values, culture, etc.

Thanks for the comment and I hope this helps address your points.

Regards,

Trevor