Adweek reported on Jopwell, a New York-based online careers platform that helps major companies connect with diverse talent. To date, Jopwell has worked with Condé Nast, the NBA, Pinterest, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and BlackRock. Probably not on the Jopwell client roster: any White advertising agencies.
This Startup Is Helping Condé Nast, Pinterest, the NBA and Other Brands Find Diverse Job Candidates
Jopwell helps major companies discover new talent
By Christopher Heine
Jopwell has been around less than two years, but it’s already being used by the likes of Condé Nast, the NBA, Pinterest, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and BlackRock. What’s the draw? Filling a cross-category industry void in helping large companies figure out how to become more diverse—that’s what.
The New York-based online careers platform specializes in helping black, Latino and Native American college students and professionals find new employers. And perhaps more importantly, Jopwell has helped 70-plus major companies find more diverse talent tens of thousands of times in recent months. The service is free for candidates and charges employers an undisclosed fee to recruit from the site.
There’s a dose of smart tech at play, too. Jopwell’s algorithms analyze a candidate’s resume, skills, past experiences and preferences. This allows Jopwell to suss out qualified applicants for hiring managers, who then can have access to them by searching the platform for candidate profiles.
D.A. Abrams, the USTA’s chief diversity officer, lauded the service.
“With so many career opportunities out there, we can only achieve our mission to promote and develop the growth of tennis by reaching out to the best diverse talent,” he said.
Jopwell, which was part of the Y Combinator startups program, has raised $4 million to date. When considering the ad industry’s problems with diverse hiring, it’s easy to see why investors are intrigued by the opportunity Jopwell appears to represent. According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, 74 percent of 4A’s members surveyed last fall felt agencies were either mediocre or worse when it comes to hiring a diverse group of employees.
And take the example of recent Fashion Institute of Technology graduate Alysia Lewis, who felt the need to pitch her employment availability via Facebook in a provocative way just to get ad companies’ attention. Her promo proclaimed: “Your Agency Hates Black Women.”
“Agencies are very white, but I didn’t mean to tell them, ‘You’re a terrible person,’” Lewis told Adweek senior editor Patrick Coffee. “It’s more of a joke, like, ‘You’re awful, sure, but you’d be 10 percent less awful if you hired me.’”
If Jopwell were to do this for ad agencies, the ad agencies would limit it to non-creative entry level positions. Sales, accounting, reception, etc. Positions that don't help decide how or when people of color are portrayed on screen, or which vendors of color are hired (if at all) to create those (or any, ethnic or not) images in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI know this, because JWT already instituted this, and limited it to new hires without any clout:
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/jwt-london-use-blind-recruitment-entry-level-hires/1402819#
It's also incredibly frustrating that the only way to get someone to hire you is if you strip any hint of your name or ethnic background away. That just delivers the message that the only acceptable hire is one who doesn't talk about, mention or convey a single word or opinion (or expertise, if we're talking about advertising) about ethnicity, ever.