Sydney-based recruitment platform Found offers military jobs for women

High Heels — The shoes of actress Cynthia Nixon are pictured as she poses during a photocall to promote the movie A Quiet Passion at the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin February 14, 2016. Reuters/Stefanie Loos

Found, a mobile-only recruitment platform based in Sydney, has secured $1.9 million in capital after an agreement with the Australian Defence Force to drive more females into the military. It was its second funding round in six months.

CEO Andrew Joyce said huge enterprises like Holden and BHP had declared commitments to promote diversity. This can be achieved by appointing more female workers.

Now, Found is rolling out new technology to target candidates with specific ads based on gender, cultural backgrounds, location and disabilities. Joyce told The Australian that they are the first recruitment platform in the country doing this. He said that some job advertisements are shown only to particular demographics. Therefore, some ads might be shown only to women, while others are shown only to men.

“We can make jobs much more appealing to a minority, rather than broad brushing for everybody and it’s making job ads really much more relevant and approachable,” he said. Joyce added that the deal with the defence force was a bid to help the military in driving applications from women into conventionally male-dominated tasks.

Found assists in hiring women for several roles. These include cargo specialists, marine technicians, armoured cavalry and military police.

Joyce revealed having generated good results with the ADF so far. “In our first month, Found generated over 10 times more applications from women than all of the traditional recruitment channels combined, including incumbents such as Seek and Indeed,” he said.

Found’s latest program has been launched after further funding from investors like Dimmi founder Stevan Premutico, MYOB CEO Tim Reed and Red Bull Holden Supercars owner Roland Dane. The app maker has obtained $4.4 million in investment.

Technology jobs

In the United States, 2,500 technology jobs were added in Arizona alone last year based on the data analysis report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, EMSI and others. Amid the growth of the industry, leaders are facing a disparity, which is the gender gap.

Yahoo, Google and Facebook all reported that employee makeup is dominated by white and Asian males. AZ Big Media notes that on average, these technology companies hire 33 percent fewer women than the than the US workforce as a whole. According to a gender gap report entitled “The Women’s Leadership Gap,” it will be 2085 when women reach parity in leadership roles in the US.

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