This post is sponsored by Lever, a new breed of applicant tracking system that emphasizes speed, collaboration and building candidate relationships.
Forget chalk and cheese; females in technology are forces to be reckoned with.
We know that women are underrepresented in many areas of the workforce. Tech is definitely one of them, with some reports warning we’re just 13% of the entire British STEM workforce (science, technology, engineering and maths). Unfortunately this gender imbalance transcends tech, and is even more prominent when it comes to leadership positions in general, with only 22 of the S & P’s 500 Companies having female CEOS. That’s a measly 4.4%!
Is it an encouragement issue? Is it a confidence thing? Is biased recruitment to blame? We don’t know, but what we do know is that a handful of tech-savvy women are absolutely bucking this trend, paving brand new paths right through the middle of the ‘people’ industry. Without further ado, let’s take a look at 4 visionary females at the forefront of HR Tech:
1. Dale Clareburt, Weirdly
Hailing from New Zealand, Dale is one quarter of the awesome foursome behind Weirdly – the app that exists to make cultural fit a measurable metric in recruitment. The whole idea is to bring out people’s wonderful uniqueness during the hiring process, so organisations and applicants can strike the perfect match.
As for credentials, Dale knows her stuff. She has a strong background in recruitment, having worked her way from team manager to COO-level roles. She knows the importance of cultural fit when it comes to correctly matching candidates to companies, and also knows how horrible and costly it is when it goes wrong. Noticing a gap in the market for a tool to help companies get it right, she buddied up with another recruiter and two software development mates to build it herself.
2. Kirsti Grant, Populate
Also from NZ, Kirsti is one of the brains behind Populate; a new software that helps companies organise headcount data, analytics and planning in a modern, accessible way. This recruitment planning tool is powered by HOP, her startup company. Before flying the flag for female CEOs in tech, she lead the recruitment and talent growth at Vend (POS / Inventor software for retailers), helping grow the talent to cover growth from 6 to 250+ teams globally.
Kirsti also spent time as a social recruitment manager at a major kiwi jobs board, and as a Directing Talent Consultant for SocialSauce. Fancy an extra piece of trivia? She’s also on the board for Weirdly – and an early adopter of the product whose CEO is next on our list.
3. Sarah Nahm, Lever
Sarah calls San Francisco home and sits at the top of the Lever tree. The product itself combines ATS and CRM capabilities into one central platform, all in the name of collaborative recruitment. As for its success to date, the proof is in the pudding, with big names like Yelp, Quora, Eventbrite and Netflix already on the books.
Before Lever, Sarah earned her product marketing stripes at Google, helping grow Chrome from 100 thousand users to 100 million. Her consultancy work across the business led her to cross paths a couple of times with the likes of Marissa Mayer (now CEO of Yahoo!). Within 5 years of graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, she’d already leveraged years of hard work to set Lever up.
On top of all this, she’s fighting the good fight as a big advocate racial and gender equality in the workplace. She’s huge on making workplace diversity a priority right across her business, and her current team of staff proves it, with 50% of the Lever team, 40% of Lever’s board and over half of the company’s people managers being women.
4. Aline Lerner, interviewing.io
After studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aline went on to work with a range of companies in the tech space, before turning her own special vision into a profitable business. What is it, you ask?
Think of interviewing.io as The Voice, but for recruitment. The anonymous technical interviewing platform allows candidates to be fast-tracked at great companies like Dropbox, Uber, Yelp and Google, without even having to submit a CV! If they do well in practice rounds, they can reveal their identity and both parties can move forward.
As well as HR innovation, Aline is really passionate about addressing the gender gap in tech. She completes her own research on the side, which helps to shape her product offering. She analyses user data to spot trends and patterns, like the underperformance of women compared to men, then conducts experiments to unearth the roots.
There you have it; 4 female CEOs crushing the HR Tech space. Next time you hear their names pop up, you’ll be able to tell everyone you know exactly why they are fearless weapons of mass digital disruption!
For more on Lever, visit their website and learn how you can accelerate hiring at your organization by making collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers effortless.
