George Oehlert and Michael Blakley, Co-Founders of Equitas: “the fairest way to conduct live interviews and hire great people”
Meet George and Michael, Co-Founders of Equitas
1. Describe your startup in two sentences?
Equitas has created the fairest way to conduct live interviews and hire great people. The reason we exist is to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces with an interview intelligence tool that reduces bias, gives interviewers time back and makes every interview count so they can hire the best people no matter what their background.
2. What gave you the inspiration?
MB: After completing 10,000+ interviews as a professional interviewer for some of the world’s biggest brands (Aldi, BSkyB, TfL & MoJ), I knew there had to be a better way. Huge amounts of bias would creep into the process. These were some of the most common biases, such as affinity bias where people who were nearly identical to the interviewers were hired, beauty bias where people who were more attractive were scored higher or even accent bias that could impact the people who were hired. Sometimes the right person was not getting the role, and this was something I could not stand for anymore.
The secondary reason was solving one of the biggest pain points of interviewing, capturing interview data accurately. In the old world this was manual note taking via pen and paper, in my previous career my hand nearly fell off from writing notes. This interview data was the most critical part of how we tried to make fair and accurate hiring decisions, yet it was being lost or filled away and never looked at again. That’s what started us on the journey of building Equitas and creating the fairest way to conduct interviews and hire.
3. How did you meet?
We met through a mutual friend, who heard Michael’s idea and immediately matched him with the best startup operator and advisor he knew, George.
George was advising some of the best startups and scaleups in London on GTM, financial modelling, product strategy and user acquisition. He saw the potential in the idea, had seen the problem first hand and jumped ship to help create a fairer approach to hiring.
4. What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?
Landing the largest employer in Ireland and growing from a handful of interviews for entry level roles in 2021 through to C-suite roles in 2022. When we started on this journey, we would never have imagined the level of impact we would have on Irish healthcare hiring. We started with one small team hiring nurses on an ad-hoc basis to be having 650+ interviews a month helping several of the biggest hospital groups in Ireland hire diverse talent. We were immensely proud to be a part of hiring 200+ vaccinators during the pandemic and helping nurses from all over the world come and work at the HSE (Irish NHS). We couldn’t have reached these milestones without hiring an incredible team in Amy (product), Javier (product), Merilin (customer success) and Rachel (marketing). We always tell others hiring is the hardest thing that they will ever do, so a big success is finding and keeping a team like this together the last couple of years.
The greatest challenge has been building an enterprise grade product with a small product team and no integrations to date. There are a lot of product features required as standard when it comes to enterprise products and some integrations that are expected for each client. With so many users hiring a wide variety of roles and building complex interview processes and frameworks we have learnt a lot and have had to filter through a lot of feedback to work out what works at scale. The challenge with this is being able to prioritise correctly, so that the product keeps evolving and can be used further and wider.
5. What kind of impact is your business having and how do you measure it?
The core impact Equitas has is on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace. Structured interviews are scientifically proven to be the most accurate way to hire, but are rife with bias, leading to companies struggling to improve their DEI. Equitas combines the fairest way to conduct live interviews with technology and data to reduce bias and continuously improve the hiring process, so the best people for the job are hired.
This is difficult to measure, as it relies on the customers’ pre-existing metrics to have a baseline. We are creating our own dataset, which will provide DEI tracking across the hiring process, identify bias hotspots and further measurement of impact. To date, we have measured the upskilling of interviewers, with 300+ interviewer training sessions on best practice interviewing in 2022, as well as our current healthcare clients making 400+ international hires from 30+ countries due to our remote interview functionality.
6. How has Covid affected your business?
Covid created opportunities for us that never existed before. Organisations who had never used a remote approach to interviews were forced to switch overnight with over 82% of companies using a remote approach to interviewing. Although there were a lot hiring freezes, we found a niche in healthcare hiring, where there was a lot of pressure with new roles to be hired for vaccinators and other healthcare roles during the pandemic. This has become our beachhead market, with both remote and face to face interviews being run through Equitas and now potentially the whole of the healthcare system in Ireland.
7. When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up?
MB: Archaeologist (to do the impossible & bring dinosaurs back - Jurassic Park)
GO: Officer in the military
8. If you weren’t doing this, what would be your plan B?
MB: If I had the ability professional athlete (running or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) or musician. But am unfortunately not so blessed. If push comes to shove, I’m be doing one of the things I love most and hiring people into life changing roles.
9. Who is your role model/ greatest influence? And why?
MB: Nelson Mandela, great things come to those who wait. The definition of committing to one’s life to goal that was more than themself alone.
Also my parents, no two harder working people you will meet who are wider loved or more respected in their communities.
10. What is your happy track?
MB: Daft Punk - Alive 2007
GO: Elton John - Your Song
11. What are your company values?
Our company’s core value is Inclusive by Default
12. What are you most looking forward to in 2023?
Doing what we love doing and do better than most, hiring top talent that cares about fair hiring.