Talent acquisition company Toast is making it easier to hire women for tech roles with a new, AI-powered recruitment platform.
The Calgary-based company’s founder and CEO, April Hicke, announced the rollout of the Toast Talent Marketplace in a LinkedIn post late last week. While still in beta, Hicke told *BetaKit *the platform is a business-to-business, software-as-a-service product that allows recruiters and companies to search Toast’s roughly 35,000-strong membership base across metrics like role, skill set, seniority, location, and more.
“Our plugin surfaces qualified women who would otherwise get filtered out rather than screening them away.”
April Hicke, Toast
“What we’re trying to do is bring that same intelligence that we have as recruiters at Toast, and allow [employers] to kind of drive that search themselves,” Hicke said.
The platform leverages semantic AI search capability, allowing users to search in plain language, and features a plug-in that allows the marketplace platform to integrate with a client’s pre-existing applicant tracking systems (ATS).
The use of AI hiring tools like ATS have been criticized for discriminating against certain demographics of applicants, increasing the prevalence of systemic biases in hiring and, in some cases, freezing out applicants across multiple hiring streams. Hicke, whose platform caters to women and gender-diverse people looking for careers in STEM fields, said she is aware of the potential pitfalls of algorithmic hiring platforms, but said Toast’s platform will prioritize inclusivity.
“Most ATS tools were designed to do one thing: filter people out at scale. It’s what helps recruiters, right? The problem is they learn from historical hiring data, and historical hiring data is biased. If a company’s past hires skewed male, the system learns that male-coded patterns predict ‘success’ and starts screening out qualified women before a human ever looks at them,” Hicke said.
“What we do is use the same infrastructure for the opposite outcome. Our plugin surfaces qualified women who would otherwise get filtered out rather than screening them away. The technology isn’t inherently discriminatory. What you choose to optimize it for is. We optimize representation.”
In development since January, Hicke said the platform is the next evolution of the Toast brand and is meant to be a way to scale the company beyond its current footprint.
“I had this moment last year where I was like ‘Okay, what do I want to do with this company?’” Hicke said. “It can continue to be a really cool, impactful business, or we can scale this globally. And, in order to scale it, we need software.”
That software is the latest effort of Toast’s COO Nicole Shokoples, who joined the company earlier this year, and Toast’s founding engineer Kainet Sajid. Hicke said she had this particular product rollout in mind when she decided to bring Shokoples on board.
“Her doing the go-to-market for this, her leading this with Kainet our engineer. It’s phenomenal.” Hicke said. “This is the next evolution of Toast, which is why I brought Nicole on board, too.”
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While the Toast Talent Marketplace might seem like it could upend the entire business model of Toast, Hicke believes it will complement rather than replace Toast’s core services. “We have some clients who really love us searching for unicorns for them,” she said. “So, I don’t think the concierge model of Toast will go away. It’s not going to completely replace it. It’s just trying to give recruiters options and allow us that evolution to expand into different markets that we potentially may not have had that one-to-one connection with before.”
A wait-list to participate in the beta version of the talent marketplace is currently open, here.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Images courtesy of April Hicke.