Traditional hiring processes often overlook qualified prospective Black candidates for job opportunities. But with some help from OneTen’s new tech-based platform, the organization hopes to generate more career paths that will level the playing field for Black talent.
Today, the coalition of leading CEOs and their organizations debuted a new talent platform that will jumpstart OneTen’s ambitious program to hire, upskill, reskill and promote one million Black individuals in their careers over the next 10 years.
“OneTen has a deeply important mission: Identifying and cultivating Black talent who the traditional career development pipelines have left behind, training them, and positioning them for success in a career,” Obed Louissaint — Senior Vice President, Transformation and Culture, IBM — said in a statement. “We hope that by placing more Black individuals in these fields, we will not only create careers and support families, but also create meaningful change in the organizations smart enough to hire them.”
To accomplish this, OneTen will lead with an expert community of Black talent, employers, workforce developers and tech companies. In doing so, it will build an innovative career development marketplace, disrupt systemic barriers and get Black people properly employed, a press release reports.
“People often respond to criticism about the lack of diversity in their organizations by saying there is a lack of talent. There is an abundance of Black talent in America, and OneTen is going to help by identifying individuals and connecting them to family sustaining job opportunities,” Merck CEO and OneTen Board Co-Chair Ken Frazier said in a statement. “A verifiable jobs and skills ecosystem catered to Black talent can help address some of these gaps. It gives people the opportunity to learn about jobs they might be qualified for, while also acquiring the skills they may be lacking.”
Companies like Bain & Company, The Bridgespan Group, Eightfold, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK) have all banded together to support OneTen’s mission and create a beneficial ecosystem to help Black applicants understand their potential career options, identify skills and educational opportunities they need, and develop digital portfolios of their prior work-related experience. As more partners join the organization’s efforts, OneTen predicts that the platform will continue to grow.
OneTen’s talent platform utilizes advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies to power its mission for Black applicants. While other hiring processes tend to be highly subjective and limit access to economic opportunities for people of color, OneTen intends to amend this practice with tech that matches Black professionals with job opportunties fit for them.
“The more employers can rely on skills in the hiring process, the less likely bias can influence hiring outcomes,” OneTen CEO Maurice Jones said in a statement. “We see the use of a skills-first approach as a business imperative to not only open the aperature of who is included in the talent pool, therefore making it more equitable, but also producing better business outcomes with higher performance and retention. By focusing more on skills, we can fast-track the career development of Black talent so they can more quickly find appropriate education opportunities and high-paying jobs.”
For more information about OneTen’s platform, visit its website.
