Kristin V. Brown writes: As criticisms of Silicon Valley’s largely white male ranks came to a boil last spring, Nicole Sanchez was in the midst of launching a company of her own — a consultancy to help companies’ diversity.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The month Vaya Consulting opened, Google released its lackluster employee diversity data to the public. At Vaya, the calls came pouring in. One company’s public relations nightmare, it turns out, is another woman’s startup.
Vaya is one of a host of upstarts seeking to turn Silicon Valley’s diversity problem into profit — helping tech companies find, recruit and retain a diverse workforce, usually for a hefty fee. Still other companies have recently added diversity services to those already offered.
In tech, diversity is now for sale.
Sanchez and her team helps clients like Pinterest with tasks such as restructuring recruitment and organizing bias training.
At Pinterest, a scrapbooking social network that has a majority of female users, the numbers are a bit better than elsewhere in tech. Overall, 92 percent of its staff is either white or Asian, but 40 percent of the more than 300 employees are women.
But Pinterest suspected that lurking in its hiring and recruiting strategies might be practices that made it harder for female, black, Latino and Native American candidates to make the cut. The company signed deals last week with Vaya, and another startup, Paradigm, to revamp the way it phrases job postings and interview questions.
Gap Jumpers, another diversity startup, sells software that helps tech companies evaluate job candidates based on talent alone.
Sound company Dolby Labs, one of Gap Jumpers’ clients, said it recently hired an engineering intern who probably would have otherwise been passed over due to a lack of experience and academic pedigree.
Gap Jumpers was started in June, and already has eight paying clients and six more testing its product. Its customers pay an annual fee of $2,000 for each hiring manager using the software.
Textio is a new company whose software detects patterns in job postings that might turn off candidates who aren’t white and male.
Entelo, a recruiting software company, added a feature in May that allows hiring managers to run searches for diverse job candidates with specific skills, such as a female software developer with expertise in JavaScript. Annual subscriptions start at $10,000.
Piazza, which makes software that college students use to communicate with professors, introduced a product last fall that lets technology companies find women taking computer science classes. The cost of that service starts at $100,000 a year.
Likewise, Sanchez, of Vaya Consulting, said she has been turning business away — too many companies seem to think hiring her will be a quick solution to a complicated problem.
