Adalo Keeps Technology Human with Talent Gleam

Katelyn wasn’t just shopping around when she started looking for startup recruitment software. She was trying to solve a real problem: how to attract, screen, interview, and hire diverse candidates for roles in which diversity was lacking.

For example, Adalo is all about women in tech. Their company name was inspired by Ada Lovelace, a woman considered to be the world’s first computer programmer. 

But apart from one female intern, their engineering team was all male.

Katelyn calls the challenge of attracting diverse candidates to a non-diverse team “paying the diversity tax.” Someone must agree to be the first and buy into the ideals behind the D&I efforts, even when the proof isn’t really in the pudding … yet.

So Adalo found themselves facing a problem: the desire to be more diverse right from the start, but sporting a small team that was primarily white and male.

Katelyn is well aware of how that might come off to candidates. She wanted to attract more diverse applicants and demonstrate Adalo’s commitment to broadening their teams’ perspectives, without making anyone feel tokenized or burdened with teaching colleagues how to behave.

They wanted an ATS that could help Adalo pave the way to a more inclusive organization, while making as few missteps as possible along the way. After all, there’s no guidebook for this sort of thing. And with significant diversity initiatives still in their infancy, even at well-established companies, Katelyn and her team knew they needed some help.

First, they tackled diversity head-on by manually redacting potentially biased information from resumes: name, graduation date, location, etc. The whole process was incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. Katelyn knew there had to be a better way.

But when she started shopping for an ATS, she was surprised to find that there weren’t many applicant tracking systems that emphasized blind screening—the feature that was most important to them.

And then, she found Talent Gleam.

Talent Gleam’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion is what first attracted Katelyn to our ATS. (Our closely aligned company values and beautiful design helped, too.)

Katelyn went out in search of an ATS with blind screening functionality, but they’re using Talent Gleam for so much more. 

Adalo’s recruitment strategy has several main initiatives, all supported by Talent Gleam:

• Talent Pools: If Silicon Valley’s culture is part of the problem, Katelyn and her team wanted to look outside that market and recruit from more diverse pools. They post on job boards focused on diverse communities that are underrepresented in tech.
• Blind Screening: Talent Gleam’s blind recruiting tool is one of their most-loved features. Where they had previously spent hours manually redacting resumes, now they can remove potential biases with the click of a button. 
• Scorecards: With an applicant pool that’s significantly more diverse, Adalo can ask everyone the same questions and assess candidates on a level playing field. Other ATS products they looked at had scorecards, too—but to Katelyn, scoring doesn’t help much unless they’re attracting the right applicants in the first place.
• Equality Monitoring: Before Talent Gleam, Adalo didn’t have a good way to do this manually. Now, Katelyn relies heavily on equality monitoring to gut-check her efforts. She looks at her reporting regularly, using it to spot roles that are missing applications from a particular group.

And Adalo doesn’t stop there.

They use a gendered language finder to eliminate biased language in posts and leverage a third-party formula to determine every position’s salary and make sure they’re competitive in the market, without carrying along any wage gaps.

This is massive action from a company their size, and it’s paying off in a big way.

And where 95% of their current employees fall within a specific bracket for age and race, more than half of their applicant pool falls outside that profile, so big change is coming soon. 

With their second big hiring push, they’ll nearly double in size—and with recruitment initiatives like these, Adalo hopes that their team will incorporate many more viewpoints and perspectives in the coming months.

When we asked Katelyn what she’d say to someone on the fence about using Talent Gleam, she said: “Talent Gleam has everything you need to tackle D&I without getting overwhelmed.” 

Overwhelm is right. Diversity and inclusion are big, complex issues, and no one gets it right without help.

Used right, technology can make us all more human, not less. Adalo’s company mission focuses on enabling makers to do just that—and at Talent Gleam, our objective is much the same. We might be small, but together we’re making big change.