I recently spoke with Porter Braswell and Ryan Williams, the co-founders of the specialty-recruiting firm Jopwell. “It’s a diversity platform, specifically for black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American candidates,” says Braswell. It’s not charity, and no talk of “lowering the bar” is tolerated. He says these are highly qualified, underrepresented candidates who most likely haven’t had access to elite campus recruiting and internship programs through which most big companies currently find minority candidates. Those are the very types of recruiting programs that brought the two co-founders to Goldman Sachs, where they worked before they developed the Jopwell concept. “We were part of a real, but small, minority diversity pipeline,” says Williams. They could see it was a bottleneck. “We started looking for ways to bring together overlooked candidates and get exposure for them at scale.”
Digital technology clearly has made so much of this easier. But Braswell points to a different catalyst: In late 2013 and early 2014, tech companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook released dismal employee diversity numbers. “It was real, it was objective, and the world was saying, whoa, where are the black and brown people?” he says. In their world, it was also an opportunity looking for a solution. “So much of our story has been around timing, and this willingness to have this uncomfortable conversation.” Jopwell launched in August 2014.
Leveraging the uncomfortable conversation, along with the palpable energy of the two founders—talking with them is like getting a shot of human potential espresso—has earned them $4.25 million in equity support from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Kapor Capital, Omidyar Network, and Magic Johnson Enterprises. And the candidates on their platform have already made over 7,000 career connections, which they define as a job application, a recruitment inquiry, an interview, or a job offer. Companies using Jopwell include big players like Carlyle Group, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce.com, Facebook, and KPMG, as well as smaller enterprises like Khan Academy and City Year.
As the site grows, they’ll be working with an increasingly rich dataset of recruiting activity and information, insights they promise to share with raceAhead. Stay tuned.