Requality is developing an Artificial Intelligence Platform, human-curated to help close the gender and pay gap in leadership.
We do this by offering Approved Employers access to engage our Exclusive Membership of top-talent female leaders and fast-track to the interview stage of the recruitment process.
in plain language:
We’re building a two-sided marketplace with in-demand talent on one side (supply), and employers seeking this talent on the other (demand).
We enrol female leaders (and aspiring leaders) into a forum-style membership zone for mentoring and interview preparation collaboration, then match them with potential employers looking to fill out leadership positions with better diversity.
Employers are vetted and must offer members an interview.
the business model:
- Free access for “Members”.
(testing also showed an opportunity for premium membership services such as resume writing, LinkedIn profile optimisation etc)
- B2B SaaS subscription for “Employers”. Leverage point being # of resumes/interviews required per month.
(testing showed that large employers would compare this with a headhunting organisation’s fees ~25% of year 1 salary, but discounted due to their charge point being “hire” not “interview”. Some testing also showed that these employers may pay a premium to have gender parity at the interview stage due to HR policies)
what’s your tech, and who does the AI..?
We’re building the MVP on bubble.io for our web application using native AWS infrastructure. We’ll use React and Leaflet at the front end, Lambda and API Gateway for scale and security and store data in S3 on PostgresSQL.
I do the “AI” today. AI/ML code (algorithm tuning) is in PyTorch, and will be deployed through AWS SageMaker.
Jason’s red-pill questions:
We locate and filter (pre-screen) potential candidates for leadership positions. Enable collaboration, mentoring and interview prep.
We offer employers access to the candidates after they have passed some equality checks.
Employers must show transparency in their process and offer our candidates an interview – hence, fast-tracking the process and removing the barrier of female applications.
With increasing pressure from employees, external stakeholders, boards and shareholders, organisations are desperate for a solution to get more female applicants and diversity in leadership teams.
Traditional (and costly) recruitment methods do not remove intrinsic bias from job description language, unconsious (and sometimes conscious) bias when shortlisting from resumes and women simply don’t apply to ads.
We want to add the ability to “one-click” add 50/50 gender parity at the interview stage. This will even up the opportunity, and allow the best candidate to be hired.
Just me, Tim, at this stage. Background in Sales, Marketing, Business & Tech.
I have help and advice from my wonderful partner Kendall and my sister Amanda – who are the inspiration for the business.
We have an advisory panel made up of multiple “women in leadership” groups.
We also have an arrangement with the Australian Institute of Machine Learning and development assistance (when I run out of personal talent).
It gets worse. For someone wanting to address inequality and disrupt sectors historically dominated and biassed towards the “old boys club”, I even look like the problem, my career has been in all the problem industries, and I’ve watched tokenism, quotas and bad policy execution from the inside.
Perhaps this is the secret weapon.
You’re not going to believe this… Top down numbers are simply insane:
- Global Recruitment Market = USD$500B
- HRTech + Job Boards = USD$200B
- Diversity, Equity & Inclusion = $15B
…if we get 1% – KIDDING! – let’s get serious here…
DE&I is growing faster than solutions can keep up (+$5B in 1 year) and “consulting” won’t scale.
The absolute top end of town (Fortune500, FSTE100, ASX200) are desperate for solutions immediately.
No, we’re pre-launch.
However, we have been selling and delivering “consulting services” on Gender Equality and helping female founders launch their businesses to assist fund our MVP build before raising. $15K to date.
Yes.
Traditional recruiters/headhunters.
This is the largest and most disrupt-able market as they still rely on job ads, which we know do not atract (enough) female candidates. It’s also the most expensive stage of the recruitment process, especially for leadership positions. Sometimes as much as 30% of a candidate’s year-1 remuneration package.
Female-friendly jobs boards.
Still reliant on job ads, but interestingly, we have found these are a better prospecting ground for us as they do some filtering of employers. They publicly list their clients because employers want to be seen to be female-friendly. This effectively offers us a direct channel to employers actively seeking to solve this problem.
Gender masking plugins to existing solutions.
We have seen the rise of job ad lanuage tools, name removal plugins to applicant tracking systems, and a variety of “widgets” to bolt onto your HR Tech stack to look like employers are taking action.
…but no marketplace to match female talent with jobs by skipping the job ad> application> resume> interview process which has the bias.
The enterprise client-side MVP build and go to market.
We leverage existing tech (low-code) to create a membership side and onboard supply via colabs with women in leadership groups, but we need to dig deep into the client side of the equation to prove value.
Marketing site:
(stealth mode)
