Kapor Capital’s 2nd Annual People Ops Tech Competition
Two years following the push for the high tech industry to release their employee demographics, the numbers remain grossly stagnant. In 2016 only 2% of Google’s employees were African American, and 3% were Hispanic/Latinx. The stats are nearly identical for Facebook.
Tech giants have blamed the lack of a pipeline as the problem, but it’s much deeper and more multifaceted than that. According to USA Today, “top universities turn out black and latinx computer science and engineering graduates at twice the rate the leading technology companies hire them.”
These students are overlooked in the hiring process, lack the advanced coding expertise to land the roles or opt-out from pursuing technical careers all together. What’s more, women and people of color that are hired are leaving the industry in droves due to inhospitable cultures inside of these firms.
Pattern matching and other biases have allowed these trends to persist for decades, making the HR/People Ops sector ripe for disruption. People Operations Technology (POT) is helping to change this narrative from decisions based on human hunches to a data-driven science leveraging technology.
“Given the changing demographics of the U.S., given the renewed attention to diversity and inclusion, we think this will raise the floor for what companies have to be doing,” says Freada Kapor Klein, partner at Kapor Capital and founder of the Level Playing Field Institute. Instead of throwing up our hands and saying “it’s just a pipeline problem that the schools need to fix” or “there is no pipeline problem, it’s a tech culture problem”, it is time to look for rigorous solutions at scale.
On December 7, 2016, Kapor Capital, will host the second annual “People Ops Tech Competition” which aims to continue to grow the sector of people ops tech solutions to mitigate bias at scale. The competition will bring together leading entrepreneurs and investors with diversity and inclusion experts, all striving to help tech and other sectors remove biases from their People Ops practices.
The competition will highlight 10 ventures that will have the chance to pitch their for-profit startups to a curated group of investors and judges, who have a track record in People Ops Tech, for $100,000 in prizes. This will be followed by a demo and showcase.
We are currently recruiting entrepreneurs from across the U.S. that are mitigating bias in every aspect of how people are hired and treated as tech employees, such as:
- Leveraging machine learning/AI/data science to find the best candidates often overlooked by recruiters
- Flagging potentially biased language in job descriptions that could unintentionally limit a pool of candidates
- Enabling hiring managers to conduct more accurate, transparent assessment of skills in the hiring process
- Increasing the validity of performance appraisal data to improve performance evaluations, succession planning, compensation adjustments, retention strategies, development initiatives, and engagement plans
- Creating pathways to careers for individuals outside of traditional recruitment pipeline, such as low/middle wage workforce, ex-offenders, veterans, and moms returning to the workforce.
- Rethinking benefits packages to protect the welfare of employees in the gig economy
- Offering career coaching and/or mentoring for underrepresented talent to better navigate path to executive leadership
- Alternative higher education models such as credentialing platforms that provide the “last mile” technical training demanded by employers and connect students directly to great first jobs
- Using tech to decrease all types of bias in every aspect of employment
I am excited to be at Village Capital and to partner with Kapor Capital to solve the problem from another angle. I personally encountered this issue early in my career. I had the right buzzwords on my resume in regards to big internship names, the right major and attended one of the target schools to land a job at Google after undergrad. A product of Detroit Public Schools and Howard University, I experienced culture shock being barely represented in the employee pool but was excited to work with the best and brightest in the nation.
However, something about my appearance didn’t settle well with my manager. During one of our first meetings, while I was still in training, she said something that has always confused and stuck with me, “You must be smart because you got hired here, but I don’t think you are capable of doing this job.” How could she size me up so quickly before I had the opportunity to prove myself? Will every mistake I make be magnified from here on out because she expects me to fail?
It is clear that diversifying the tech workforce will be a gradual change, especially in large firms where the culture was set from the beginning and is difficult to change. The silver lining is that a number of startups are being piloted and tested to challenge the way things are currently done.
Last year’s People Ops Tech Competition winners approached the issue from different angles. The first place winner, Painless 1099, manages benefits for the gig economy by providing automated tax withholdings for freelancers and independent contractors. Atipica uses big data to understand diversity and other pain points in recruiting pipelines. Blendoor is a blind recruiting app that facilitates matching based on merit, not molds.
If you have a product that has the potential to shake up this industry, please apply today! The deadline is November 2, 2016.
Questions? E-mail Ebony Pope at ebony.pope@vilcap.com.
