AiThority Interview with Laura I. Gomez, Founder and CEO at Atipica

Know My Company

What is your experience about the journey into Technology?

I grew up in Silicon Valley and started working in tech when I was 17. I have been building products and growing teams for a decade and a half, including running the Localization team at Twitter. I worked closely with HR to build out policies on visas, maternity leave and more. I saw that the lack of diversity and women in management led to challenges within the company and employee inclusion.

What galvanized you to start Atipica?

A few years ago, I was on a panel at Stanford Law School with executives from Google and Facebook alongside the Reverend Jesse Jackson. I heard again, we can’t and don’t know how to solve our lack of diversity. These companies were using data science and AI to build autonomous vehicles and advanced facial recognition, but they couldn’t wrap their heads around using the same technology to help tackle Diversity and Inclusion.

Atipica was born on that day.

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What is Atipica and how does it fit into the current Technology landscape?

At Atipica, we have created an Inclusive AI that centralizes data through analytics thus allowing companies to view their talent data, including the demographic makeup of their candidate pool outside of self-reporting. They are able to track and measure progress towards inclusion and optimize their workforce for current and future talent needs.

How can modern HR teams fully-transform their hiring process to build diverse teams?

They need to ask themselves questions such as:

• How do I use data to set goals for improving diversity and inclusion?
• Within the hiring funnel, are candidates from underrepresented backgrounds being treated equitably?
• Which recruiting efforts to engage underrepresented communities are most effective?

When companies leverage data and best practices from products that emphasize data-purposeful Diversity and Inclusion and align them with business goals, they can adapt to the changing dynamics of the workforce.

What is the return on investment of ‘inclusive’ hiring? How do you measure it using Atipica?

We see time and time again that businesses benefit from automating D&I data, reducing manual reporting and fragmentation by 95% and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in targeting the behaviors that have to be targeted for change whether they are the company rejections, applicant withdrawals or industry trends.  By using our own patent-pending technology to infer race and gender by methodologies outside of self-reporting, we help business set centered goals not skewed by sparse D&I data.

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Tell us more about your AI-driven Inclusive Hiring platform. What is the role of automation in removing biases from the hiring processes?

We acknowledge that as humans, we are all biased. Sometimes we are conscious of these biases (which we call prejudice), sometimes we are not. As one of the first tech products to interrupt biases in the recruiting processes, Atipica anonymizes names and neutralizes skill pattern matching in resumes and professional profiles.

What does your Ideal Customer Profile look like? Which businesses are the fastest to adopt your HR Technology products for hiring and diversity at the workplace?

We work with companies ranging in size from 150 employees to 100,000 employees. Our clients are in all sectors, including technology, media, healthcare, and finance. With all the companies we partner with, we’re able to get them up and running on our software platform in as little as one week.

What is the state of Hiring technology in 2019? How much has it evolved since the time you first started Atipica?

Hiring technology has evolved since Atipica started in 2015. Back then, companies were just beginning to speak publicly about their efforts to build a more diverse team. Now, companies know that in order to retain their employees, they need technology, especially AI, that will help them be more inclusive. We’ve also seen a big rise in HR companies building out diversity and inclusion “features” in their products. We know that this is too big of a challenge to tackle with a feature.

How does Atipica leverage technology to make candidate searches easier and faster?

We’ve made many recruiters’ lives easier. Our technology has allowed companies to stop doing keyword searches and Boolean strings altogether. We’ve helped recruiting teams reduce time to hire, automate many of their manual tasks, and better understand which sources are bringing in the most compatible candidates for open roles.

How can customers connect your technology to HRMS?

Our engineering team has built out a variety of integrations to HRMS. Reach out to us to learn more!

What is your new approach to building interactive Hiring dashboards and analytics? How does Atipica deliver on its promises?

We believe that data is only valuable if it serves a purpose. All of the data we show on our Atipica platform brings customers insights into either their current hiring trends or where they need to make improvements today.

We provide a lot of product support and services, we know the investment in enterprise D&I Business Intelligence (BI) is not easy, so we focus on a people-first approach. In addition to providing in-person coaching on best practices for leveraging data to build out diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies.

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Which Marketing and Sales Technology solutions do you use at Atipica?

At Atipica, we use Copper as our Customer Relationship Manager, PersistIQ, and SendGrid for emails. We also love partnering with other companies led by underrepresented founders in the tech industry, so reach out to us!

Which start-ups in the tech industry interest you the most and why?

Compass is amazing. They are helping companies look at compensation, pay and equity as a must to retain employees through an inclusive lens.

What technologies within AI and HR Technology are you interested in?

Those that think about responsible, ethical and empathetic, not to mention consensual, use of people’s data in AI.

In HR Technology, what are the new emerging markets that you see providing the biggest opportunities?

We see all companies as a big opportunity for expanding our diversity and inclusion technology partnerships. Consumers want the producers of their products to have teams that reflect their own diversity. We’ve seen this with companies like Netflix, which has been able to grow out a more diverse team and create content that caters to folks from all different backgrounds, domestic and internationally.

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

Gratitude. When we are grateful to do the work we are doing, our work will shine.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

@bethanye

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Thank you, Laura! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.