Buzzwords like equity, diversity and inclusion have been bolded in mission statements and tossed around the conference rooms of corporate America since long before the pandemic.
Christabel Agbonkonkon’s new hiring platform, BlackUp, is eager to find out just how ready companies are to commit to those values.
The Frisco resident’s tech startup, which officially launched its online platform March 31, bills itself as a one-stop-shop for Black professionals. The platform plans to improve on tools found on established job search sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, while also serving Black professionals looking to work with diversity-conscious companies.
“We were able to come up with the kinds of technology that we need, the kinds of products we need to offer, and the kind of tracking that we need to do to be able to help companies not only hire, but sustain the hiring,” Agbonkonkon said.
Agbonkonkon, who works with her development team remotely, was inspired to create the platform after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers set off a wave of racial justice marches and rallies across the country, including in Dallas.
“This was my way to be able to contribute, to say ‘OK, what is broken? And how can we fix that?’” she said. “I just saw this whole idea of helping Black people become more self-reliant through this process as a way to solve the larger problems.”
Originally from Nigeria, Agbonkonkon grew up learning from her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit. A government worker, her mother often sold clothes to colleagues, and encouraged Agbonkonkon to find her own path as an entrepreneur.
Agbonkonkon later raised the money to complete her bachelor’s degree by selling organic honey, a business that became increasingly more lucrative throughout her college years.
“I don’t see it as selling, I just love to talk to people … just doing business as an extension of that. You get to meet people and you get to talk to them,” she said.
After living in both Pennsylvania and California, her family made its way to Frisco in 2018 in search of better schools. She has spent the last 20 years after receiving her master’s degree from Brigham Young University in public administration working as a stay-at-home mother, raising her five kids, and volunteering at both her children’s schools and her church.
When she looked for resources to create what would become BlackUp, she contacted her alma mater. She found a few BYU professors willing to help her find a starting point.
So was Brigitte Madrian, the first female dean of the Marriott School of Business at BYU, who viewed the endeavor as being deeply connected to her own goals of diversity and inclusion, Agbnokonkon said.
The business school offered development support to Agbonkonkon and footed the $50,000 bill to give BlackUp nine student interns for eight weeks last summer, Agbonkonkon said.
“I had all these fuzzy ideas of what I wanted to do, but I was able to crystallize that as I started to work with the team at BYU,” Agbonkonkon said.
After months of student-collaborative research, Agbnokonkon had enough data to begin building her platform. Her background is in public administration so she brought on BYU professors Greg Anderson and Mark Keith, who assisted in her research, to be co-founders and lead the platform development.
Through their research, they collected an email list of 10,000 Black professionals who’ve shown interest in joining the platform. Her goal is to reach one million users “sooner rather than later.”
“We feel like the success of this is [to] have more people on the platform. I think it’s better for the companies,” she said. “I hope … a lot of black professionals will jump on and sign up, because the success of this is dependent on the numbers.”
Other than the paid interns BYU provided, the initial development has been bootstrapped by Agbonkonkon and her co-founders. She and her team are looking for investors, with a goal of raising $500,000 and bringing on a full-time engineer.
“If something happens, there’s nobody that I could say, ‘hey, can you go get it done right now,’ because Greg and Mark may be teaching a class when that happens … it’s kind of a little bit difficult that way,” she said.
BlackUp’s focus is filling the equity gap that Black professionals face in the job market. How is it going to do that? By harnessing the power of unbiased coding, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, Agbonkonkon said.
“It’s not just a job that the company is hiring simply because they’re trying to fill a quota or something, but rather intentionally matching candidates to companies using AI and machine learning,” she said. “We believe that when people are better matched to the jobs that they have qualified for, it will help them to stay in their jobs.”
In her research, Agbonkonkon said she found that coding written by primarily white men often had bias that worked against non-white users. One study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says commonly used supervised learning algorithms can improve hiring rates at the cost of “eliminating Black and Hispanic representation.”
“We needed to have better algorithms, and that’s what BlackUp is designed to do. To provide that better matching algorithm and better screening process for both companies and for employees,” Agbonkonkon said.
The features, available to users for free, begin with job searching.
Agbonkonkon said one of her goals is to create company-applicant matches that withstand the test of time. Users can also take advantage of opportunities to network, or leave a review about their experience with a company. The platform is available online, with plans to roll out an app version.
The company also places a heavy focus on tracking and rating a company’s diversity and inclusion record, creating its own metrics that give partner companies an accurate reflection of their staff and hiring patterns.
“When you come as a company and you work with us, it’s not just the hiring alone, we also help to optimize the Black employee experiences. … We provide Black employees an opportunity to rate and review your company. We take all of those ratings and reviews, and we send you reports,” she said. “Companies will get to see in real time how they’re doing.”
In lieu of traditional advertising methods, BlackUp is relying primarily on partnerships with influencers and companies to attract users to the platform.
“This is also putting money back into the hands of Black people. We decided to work [with] people who already have access to these people,” she said.
BlackUp intends to be the bridge between companies looking to hire Black professionals and the hiring pool, making the platform’s company partnership model more desirable. Partner companies pay in a subscription model, either monthly or yearly, to post jobs, reach candidates, and receive customized diversity reports.
“We’re just here to help companies. It’s something that I feel deeply about, I care so much about, and I feel like it’s so needed, but I also see the struggles that companies are facing. They don’t have to continue to struggle, because we have the solution.”
This subscription-style service will account for the majority of revenue, Agbonkonkon said. She has big goals for BlackUp’s potential and scalability.
“This is a $5 billion total addressable market just focused on the U.S.,” Agbonkonkon said. “If we’re able to get even 20% of that, it’ll be a massive amount of money.”
