Meet Bruce Marable: The Serial Entrepreneur Who Wants to Transform Your HR Department
What’s Your Impact? | For Marable, data drives justice in the workplace.
Bruce Marable’s first venture was a dud — and he’ll be the first to admit it. Called UniversityBay, it was a crossover between Craigslist and what now is Facebook Marketplace that operated on college campuses. Students could swap items on a transparent and transactional basis, and while the startup got little traffic, it showed Marable that as long as he had the grit, entrepreneurship could be accessible.
“It really taught me that I had the skills, the passion, and the stomach for creating a startup from scratch,” he says. “From there, I never wanted to work. I always wanted to start a company.”
Marable acknowledges that his education and upbringing were — and still are — the exception to the norm in Philadelphia. He went to two of the city’s most competitive public secondary schools — Masterman and Central — whose waning Black populations demonstrate the accessibility gap for resource–rich education. He participated in after–school leadership development programs at The Enterprise Center, a West Philly community organization dedicated to empowering underrepresented business owners. He attended West Chester University as a Communications major, where he was surrounded by professors that challenged his entrepreneurial spirit regularly.
In a city where high teacher turnover leaves students in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods in West and North Philly feeling unsupported, Marable’s bubble of opportunity insulated him from imposter syndrome as he graduated college and entered the workforce. “I had been told that I was a smart kid since I was ten. And so when you hear that and see that and feel that from the fifth grade, when you get to college, it is what it is,” he says. “[I] looked at everyone else as equals.”
Now, Marable is using this tenacity to change how Human Resource departments at small to medium–sized companies approach hiring and inclusion with his latest venture, Employee Cycle. Founded in 2016, Employee Cycle creates a customizable and comprehensive analytics dashboard for HR professionals that can track and visually model everything from turnover and retention by ethnicity to Glassdoor rating trends. The point? To enable teams to be proactive about inclusive hiring practices instead of reacting to discrimination after it happens over and over again.
“The ability to understand and measure the impact of increasing the data literacy of the entire HR ecosystem for small and medium companies is really important to us. Because the faster and the better we are at doing that, HR leaders will be able to identify workforce trends before companies have problems — before they become toxic, before they start creating bias,” Marable says. “[Doing so] can help prevent things like gender pay or ethnicity pay disparities. The more you’re able to understand that data and look at root causes of the problems, the fewer problems hopefully companies will have.”
Over the past 6 years, Big Tech has struggled to make good on their overdue promises to rectify the gap between white executives and developers and Black professionals gunning for those same roles. We know the statistics well: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to donate $10 million to racial justice campaigns, yet Facebook has only seen its proportion of Black employees grow from 3% to 3.8% over the past 5 years. Amazon made a similar pledge, and while their proportion of Black employees jumped 11% from 2015 to 2020, most of those employees work for minimum wage as warehouse workers or delivery drivers with little hope for promotion.
However, according to Marable, these problems reproduce more acutely at small businesses, where HR departments are often overworked and understaffed, leading diversity and inclusion initiatives to fall to the wayside if they aren’t immediate moneymakers. “As an HR professional, you already have a roadmap of all these tactical things you have to do — you have to recruit, you have to make employees engaged, you have to do performance management,” Marable says. “What happens is that, unfortunately, things like diversity end up being a nice to have versus a must–have. It just goes to the bottom of the totem pole.”
That said, a lack of time is merely an excuse to ignore the obvious: diverse companies are better ones, even if that notion makes you uncomfortable. According to SCORE, a nonprofit dedicated to helping small businesses succeed, ethnically diverse companies are 33% more likely to outperform their competitors and make decisions twice as fast.
So, how do you get CEOs and managers to care about diversity? You prioritize it with a business case, according to Marable, and not just public pressure.” You prioritize [diversity] by making a use case as to why diversity will make your company better. If HR can effectively do that with the CEO and the leadership team, then these departments can get more resources,” he says.
Still, making the case for diversity matters just as much as how you make it. “One of the things we realize is that with HR leaders, most of the data on diversity and inclusion is typically cooped up in the HR department. And the reason why a lot of that data doesn’t necessarily get acted upon is that it’s really not exposed to and shared with a lot of other people for them to say, ‘Oh wow! I never realized how much of a problem this was.’” Marable says. “Instead, we rely on anecdotal conversations a lot of the time, which leads companies to plateau in their hiring practices.” He recommends HR professionals present their demographic data visually and clearly, which will make pay disparities and retention rates more transparent and lead to solutions with built–in accountability mechanisms.
After all, he says, “The more people that identify that there’s a problem, the more we believe that people will actually solve the problem.”
However, Marable acknowledges that plenty of companies are meeting organizations like Coded by Kids where they are by expanding their recruitment strategies beyond HBCUs to nonprofit, career development programs, and other sources. That’s why programs like OnE Philadelphia, a tech education helmed by Coded by Kids to connect underrepresented youth digital literacy and coding classes from kindergarten onward to internships and mentorship, matter. They expose youth to futures previously unimaginable.
“Kids don’t really get the exposure to the potential world of all the jobs. So they end up going to school, picking a bullshit major they never wanted to be in, and getting a job in a field they don’t like or are unqualified to be in. People keep ending up on the career treadmill,” Marable says. “That’s why we must create a lot more exposure at a younger age to different jobs in different categories.”
