By her own account, Sara Menke was “born pretty fired up” about equity and equality. While working as a recruiter in her early 20's, she was trying to place an incredibly qualified candidate. The woman was consistently turned away from job openings because she was trans, not because she wasn’t qualified. “I almost quit my job that day, it rocked me to my core,” says Menke. “I didn’t know that people couldn’t get a job if they were qualified, I’d never thought of that as a possibility. It opened my eyes.”
That experience, and her drive to make sure it didn’t happen again, would later motivate Menke to start her first business in 1998, a recruiting agency called Premier Talent Partners. Menke, already a successful recruiter in the San Francisco Bay Area, frequently had people come up to her in public and thank her for changing their lives. She deeply believed in what she did on an individual level, but she wanted to be able to help more people. At Premier she created a workplace that reflected that goal, and developed more people who were passionate about removing bias from hiring and who could see the possibility in each individual. Once she’d reached what felt like the peak of how she could elevate Premier, she wanted to figure out how to scale.
“There had to be a way for us to force multiply the impact we were making,” says Menke. “I knew one of the ways we could do that was to blend our workflow processes and our secrets to success with technology. We started on a quest to define how that might work.”
In 2019 Menke started Ajna, which is a platform that aims to help companies reduce unfair bias in hiring and find the best candidate for their job opening. Menke credits her relationship with City National Bank—which feels more like a trusted ally than a financial institution—with helping her grow her $40 million company, and helping her change the world of recruiting for the better.
“Ajna is a tool that reduces bias from the hiring process by getting rid of resumes, and redacting certain information on a candidate’s profile,” says Menke. The first few rounds are done blind with no picture or name visible. Only the candidate's relevant skills, experience, and key criteria are to be considered. Beyond bias, qualified candidates can be missed if the keywords on their resumes don’t match the keywords on a job posting. This means that people can be inadvertently overlooked just due to how the system works. At Ajna candidates can simply fill out a profile and instantly see job matches, and companies can instantly see the compatible candidates for their posting. “With Ajna there are very few hard cutoffs to the system. As long as you’re skilled and qualified you could be matched to a job,” Menke says. “You’re not likely to be excluded. You’ll have an opportunity to be seen, and companies will overlook less talent.”
Reducing bias in hiring is integral for operations. Creating diverse teams can help businesses better compete in the global market, and improve employee retention (people are more likely to stick around if their unique perspective and skills are valued). Menke’s work to help companies meet their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals aligns her with City National’s core mission to support the communities that it does business with.
Doing this work hasn’t been without challenges. While Menke was the CEO of a successful company, she’d never started a technology business before and there were new things to learn and new levels of complexity to navigate while building Ajna. It was (and still is) a learning process for Menke and her team. They built and rebuilt, did and undid. “There are just things that we can’t see until we get there,” says Menke. “And it takes time to build something right.” But despite the challenges, she’s been able to scale Ajna and it’s continuing to grow: Menke uses the technology to help Premier place candidates, and other companies have also used the tool on their own to create a search to find the best person for their posting.
Menke is deeply thankful that she was already banking both personally and professionally with City National before COVID. “Because of that relationship we are where we are today. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t be here,” she says.
But even before the pandemic, City National was helping her succeed by creating the right structure for her to reach her goals. “I was looking for a banking relationship where they would wrap their arms around me, have trust in who I am, and who we are as an organization, and where they would guide me,” she says. City National took a personal approach to understanding what they could do to help her and her businesses be successful. “I’m so excited about how we’re continuing to grow, and to know that we have City National there always supporting us is invaluable. It’s one of the reasons why I think I’m so confident in what I’m doing.”
Through working with City National, Menke can focus on what she does best: fulfilling her dream of bringing equity to the hiring landscape and reducing bias from the recruiting process.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for City National Bank.
