BPTN’s Obsidi connects recruiters with Black IT talent

The core mission of Black Professionals in Tech Network is to help bridge the network gap between Black IT professionals and career opportunities across North America.

To that end, BPTN launched Obsidi in 2021 as a “multi-sided marketplace” that serves as a community for Black tech professionals to network globally, find events to attend, connect with mentors, gain insights from executives from leading tech companies, and access potential job opportunities.

But when it comes to Black representation at most IT organizations, the problem does not lie in a lack of available talent. Rather, the problem often lies in insular networking practices and unconscious biases that create hiring bubbles throughout the industry.

“It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of network with that talent. It’s not a talent gap — it’s a networking gap,” says Matthew Douglas, head of partnership and sales at Obsidi.

As a result, many companies, seeking to diversify their IT teams, struggle at times connecting with professionals from underrepresented communities.

“[Organizations] came to us and said, ‘How do we access this diverse talent? How do we make these meaningful connections? How do we build trust with these communities that we’ve never engaged with before?’ So that’s when we started Obsidi Recruit,” says Anirudh Sharma, vice president of product and development at Obsidi.

[ See also: 16 professional organizations for Black IT pros ]

Launched in 2023, Obsidi Recruit is a service for businesses looking to diversify their talent pipelines. Obsidi offers the recruitment service through scalable subscription plans to ensure there’s a package for organizations ranging from small startups to global enterprises. Interested companies can also opt for a free trial to see whether Obsidi Recruit is a good fit for their recruitment needs.

Once established on the platform, organizations can create profiles, establish a brand image, and make connections directly with the Obsidi community through thought leadership posts and other community interactions.

“It allows [companies] to build that talent pipeline, even if they’re not recruiting today. It allows them to start building those meaningful connections,” says Anirudh.

Battling unconscious bias in networking

When recruiting new hires, hiring managers and leaders are typically more inclined to draw from their own communities — a traditional practice that can lead to unintentional bias in hiring, narrowing an organization’s talent pool without recruiters and hiring managers realizing.

“Not being well connected with Black and diverse communities ends up resulting in a fairly homogenous talent pipeline,” says Douglas, adding that “an industry’s networks are only as diverse as the recruiters and hiring managers.”

That’s why it’s so important to be intentional with your hiring practices. Otherwise, when it comes to hiring, mentorship, promotions, and succession planning, people are more likely to “bet on potential” if it’s someone they “have something in common with,” Douglas says. 

“Unless you’re going to make a conscious effort to — what I like to say — ‘vibe outside your tribe,’ and go and connect with people that you typically wouldn’t necessarily be associated with, you’re going to keep [hiring and promoting] more and more of the same,” he says.

Douglas gives the example of a hiring manager who works down the hall from someone more junior, but their sons play on the same hockey team. In this instance, the two colleagues have something in common, and that hiring manager is going to see themselves in that employee. However, if it was an employee who had a child playing another sport, something from another culture or part of the world, it’s not as effortless to “assimilate and have a conversation outside of work.”

That other employee is going to have to “prove ten times over” that they can do every aspect of the job, compared to the other employee down the hall — someone the leader can see themselves in. It’s not just about diversifying your talent pipelines, but also about creating “access to opportunities, sponsorship, and mentorship as a whole,” Douglas says.

“That’s where the Obsidi platform helps bridge that gap — we provide opportunities for individuals to find mentors, for senior executives to share their knowledge, thought leadership and experiences,” he says.

Through Obsidi, Black IT professionals can connect with other professionals who have similar experiences and backgrounds and who can mentor them through their careers. It’s a resource for Obsidi members to gain valuable advice on how to network within in their organizations, better set themselves up for promotions, and grow their careers.

And, through Obsidi Recruit, organizations seeking to connect with Black IT talent have an outlet for bridging that networking gap as well.

Implementing AI to navigate recruitment bias

In October of last year, Obsidi Recuit launched a new featured called Talent Finder, which uses AI for candidate matching on the platform. The algorithm works to “pair candidates with the rules based on their skills,” showing recruiters the top 10 candidates for the jobs that they’ve posted, reducing the amount of time spent sifting through irrelevant resumes.

“We do not consider AI as a be all and all solution. It’s meant to be an assistant to the recruiter — it’s meant to reduce the workload of a recruiter. It is not physically possible for a recruiter to review 1,000 resumes and make valid decisions on who’s the best match for the job,” says Anirudh.

It also allows candidates to better avoid common recruiting woes such as applicant tracking systems, saving them from spending time tailoring each resume to hopefully make its way through an ATS. In fact, Anirudh says that Obsidi has used the feature themselves, filling roles inside their own organization using the AI talent matching feature.

One concern around AI algorithms is how they’re trained, and what unconscious biases might slip into the programming, leading to biased algorithms that exclude or overlook underrepresented groups. But Obsidi’s AI algorithm was built by a diverse team, using data from their platform of Black IT professionals, ensuring there is no unconscious biases against Black IT professionals. Using AI to parse through resumes can ensure that the focus remains on skills, experience, and other objective criteria besides race or gender.

Anirudh says that partners who have used Obsidi Recruit report that they have gone on to identify unconscious bias within their own organizations. After accessing the majority-Black tech talent on Obsidi Recruit, many organizations have had to ask themselves why these same qualified candidates did not appear in their traditional recruitment efforts. With these insights, organizations can more objectively zoom out and identify where their talent pipeline is broken.

Connecting recruiters with an engaged community

The community on Obsidi Recruit is highly engaged and active on the platform — it serves as both a job board site and a professional social networking platform. Even when members of the platform aren’t actively searching for jobs, it’s still likely they will be active on the platform to engage with the community.

As a result, Obsidi Recruit gives recruiters access to a highly responsive pool of diverse candidates, especially compared to other job boards where people may abandon accounts after they land a job. The users on Obsidi Recruit remain active, reaching out to ask for advice, post job recommendations, share career advice, give feedback on succession planning advice, and more.

For organizations that find the traditional recruitment methods such as job fairs, internal recommendations, and universities aren’t expanding their talent pipeline, Obsidi Recruit can help close that gap, connecting organization with more than 80,000 potential candidates. Companies that are committed to diversifying their ranks can turn to Obsidi Recruit to broaden their network of potential future talent.

“When I joined Obsidi almost a year ago, it was very clear to me that this platform is not just another tech product. This is a movement that’s built on a very deep and critical purpose — we’re here to emphasize just one simple truth. And the truth is that Black talent is not rare, it’s very abundant, it’s very accessible, and it is thriving everywhere,” says Anirudh.

See also:

• 16 professional organizations for Black IT pros
• Black Tech Pipeline connects Black IT pros to DEI-committed employers
• How Blacks in Technology Foundation is ‘stomping the divide’
• How BUiLT unites Black IT pros and builds equity
• DevColor’s cohort approach to uplifting Black IT careers
• ITSMF: Growing Black IT careers through leadership programs