Hallo “two.point.oh”
A Word from Our CEO
Since its founding, Hallo has focused on democratizing the access of information and network regardless of race, gender, wealth, or university prestige. With that foundation, and as we set our sights on launching an updated version of Hallo, I’ve had time to reflect on our mission as a company and why we set out to build this platform.
One of my sources of inspiration as I imagined Hallo was my personal story. I grew up in Rochester, New York, where roughly 50% of students graduate high school. My path, which led me to an engineering role at Capital One, seemed all but impossible.
I graduated high school at 16 and navigated my way to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Computer Information Systems program. As the end of my college years approached, my interest in technology and math didn’t align with what the companies visiting VCU had to offer. When the time came to make a decision, I found myself choosing between Wall Street and Capital One roles, and I was ultimately won over to Capital One through a simple yet effective pitch that I’ll never forget.
“Our competition isn’t Morgan Stanley, it’s Facebook,” the recruiter told me. “We’re a technology-driven institution.”
I continue to think about these words as I build Hallo, not because of their content, but because they were inside information about the nature of the role and the culture of the company. Rather than simply working with numbers, I’d be focused on key technology principles, and that was something I felt excited to get behind.
I went on to become a part of the team that built Capital One’s first native mobile banking application, become a “white-hat hacker,” and even work on the derivatives trading floor.
The moral of the story is that I had access to information. Information about the job, the company culture, what I’d be working on, and how my skills could help the company achieve its goals. When I went on to start Hallo, I wanted to provide that same opportunity at scale for every college graduate, regardless of race, gender, wealth, or university prestige.
Now more than ever, there are many of us who stand for bringing equal opportunity to every person, regardless of whether they’re a high school grad, college student, or working professional. At Hallo, we’re focused on having a positive impact on college students and their transition into the “real world,” bringing them the information they need to make informed key life decisions about the first steps in their career.
Diversity, COVID-19, and the Hallo Team
Over the past four months, the world has come to a boiling point as it pertains to equal rights. As an African-American founder, it’s something I take very seriously. I’ve personally experienced a handful of challenges as our team continues to build a platform that has diversity at the center of its mission.
In the past, I’ve spoken to the deluge of responses coming from companies regarding how they’re addressing diversity issues within their organization. Today, I want to challenge companies with both obvious and hidden diversity issues to make honest change by way of working with diverse teams.
If you’re simply buying products from diverse organizations or adding bold-on fixes, such as bias and diversity trainings, I encourage you to dig deeper. Leaders need to find concrete ways to fuse intention, conversation, and action within their organizations, and one of the best ways to do this is to examine the diversity of the workforce, from the executive team to the interns.
There’s a plethora of research that shows we need diverse teams to do the best work possible, so diversity isn’t only the right thing for the world and for people, it’s essential to building a successful company.
As we expand the team at Hallo, we’re fortunate to work with extremely intelligent individuals who come from a variety of backgrounds and communities. The results we’ve seen are undeniable.
The New Hallo
With a reflection on our mission and essential notes on diversity out of the way, let’s dig into the latest version of Hallo and the new features we’ve created to better support students, companies, and universities.
LIVE Video Events
We’ve recently introduced LIVE Video Q&A events, a more personalized take on our traditional zoom dial-in Q&A events that allow for face-to-face interactions and conversations with multiple speakers. It’s never been easier to create connections that feel like a 1:1 over a cup of coffee.
Our hope is that this new feature allows for deeper connections. Students from more than 1,200 universities can now connect in a more personalized way with recruiters from top companies across the United States. Think of it like a laid back Facetime for recruiters and a handful of candidates.
The Hallo Score
Enjoy a new lens through which to evaluate students on our platform with the Hallo Score, which seeks to eliminate biases, provide a fair evaluation of a student’s vocational value, and encourage diverse recruiting.
Employers are oftentimes tied to university prestige biases, which lead them to attract and recruit similar students from a handful of universities time and time again. To encourage the elimination of these biases, we’ve created the Hallo Score.
Students will be ranked through fair, proprietary scoring technology based on their “grit,” major, school, and several other factors. The score will be shown on the student’s profile to recruiters, and the result is a balanced representation of a candidate independent of recruiter bias and pattern matching.
Better Analytics for Companies
Today, consumer brand and employer brand are practically synonymous. People work for people they buy from and vice versa. Even if the majority of companies want to tap into diverse communities, many don’t understand how to hold conversations with members of the community regarding brand sentiment.
To make these key conversations more accessible and measurable, we’ve created a dashboard for companies to understand how communities view them as a brand. Companies will also be able to receive direct feedback through surveys, which can improve understanding about how to better attract talent from these communities.
Additionally, companies can discover untapped talent by university. For example, the University of North Carolina Charlotte improved its brand awareness following an event with Coinbase. The dashboard showed Coinbase that it had a large percentage of “fans” in that area. The following year, Coinbase attended a UNC-C career fair with the confidence that the event would have a higher ROI than it would have if they were shooting in the dark with no data.
More Data for Universities
Our 1,200+ university partners have continually requested more data, and our new university dashboard gives career services teams just that. Through the dashboard, you’ll have access to real-time data about students actively using Hallo, be able to manage and create employer relationships, have control over which companies have access to your students, and more.
This new dashboard gives universities the power to develop new relationships with employers, invite current career fair attendees to host Q&A events with your students using the platform, and pull automated vendor report requests.
Join the New & Improved Hallo
The new Hallo is simpler and easier to use, with new features students, universities, and employers will love. We’ll keep improving the experience — and if you haven’t joined Hallo yet, you can sign up today at hallothere.com or schedule a demo by emailing kd@hallothere.com.
