By Business & Finance 
Athena Karp is Founder and CEO of HiredScore, an AI-driven company which helps remove bias from hiring and ensures better fairness and inclusion, which is now part of Workday.
What are your main priorities and goals in your role?
My focus is on leveraging AI to tackle the most critical challenges in hiring, talent management, and workforce planning. Since founding HiredScore in 2012, I’ve been driven by a mission to make hiring fairer and more efficient through responsible and explainable AI. Now, as part of Workday, I’m dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve at the intersection of work and finance; which for most organisations typically begins with transforming how they recruit, develop, and manage talent – from external candidates to internal employees – and continually exploring new ways of expanding the impact of HR through shifting operating models.
The great thing about this work is that it enables me to find ways that technology can help workforces be more representative of the populations they serve and unlock hiring for potential. That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about initiatives like Opportunity Onramps, which reflects our vision for workforce inclusion and is a win for the talent and for the companies that gain access to their contributions.
What are your biggest challenges as CEO?
As CEO, my biggest challenge was driving a culture of innovation, continual change, and relentless curiosity, while also having a meaningful impact on the future of work problems we care so deeply about. The challenge was rarely about the limits of the technology, but rather about aligning the right solutions with the right problems, guided by a company-wide commitment to building responsible AI. At the heart of it all, I strived to be a leader deserving of the amazing talent, customers, and opportunities to change our industry at such a critical time.
How do you keep your team/staff motivated?
I’m often asked how we were able to retain such incredible talent for 2-3 times longer than the typical startup tenure. The key was having the patience to wait for the right people to join us as we scaled (professionally, but who were also good human beings!), as well as our commitment to continual innovation – always in partnership with our clients. I’ve found that our team is most motivated by the fact that they feel they are collaborating with some of the best professionals in their field, not just within their own departments but in cross-functional teams as well.
This culture of excellence was further fueled by our incredible customers, who presented us with the opportunity to work in new areas and create new solutions that solved their next generation of ‘future of work’ challenges. This constant stream of innovative work kept our team continually motivated and excited about how we could reshape our industry. Now, as part of Workday, we remain deeply committed to fostering this same level of innovation across the hardest challenges – leading to meaningful work and ensuring our team feels inspired and appreciated every step of the way.
What are the challenges facing your industry going forward?
One of the most interesting challenges we face is making work – hiring and promotions in particular – more fair while also more efficient. There are so many ways AI can be leveraged to bring business effectiveness and cost savings, but focusing on the intersection of meaningful impact for people and the business is key. After spending the past 12 years focused on recruiting, talent management, and contingent hiring, I’m especially excited by how AI can be used to solve the next layer of critical challenges. These include fostering employee growth and development, helping managers become better people leaders, and providing transparency on how jobs are changing and how talent can be best positioned and ready for these changes.
What new trends are emerging in your industry?
An interesting trend is how AI can actually facilitate the long-held vision of hiring for potential. Beyond providing employees with the maximum opportunity for growth and development, this approach is becoming a business necessity due to labour shortages and a growing talent scarcity for the demands and skills of the future. However, with AI, we have the ability to reduce the uncertainty and business risks of hiring differently, as AI can uniquely augment a lack of experience or know-how in performing role-specific tasks or work. While most discussions have focused on lifting rigid educational requirements, technology as well as a C-suite focus in this area has the potential to reshape how people are able to find meaningful work and participate in the workforce.
Are there any major changes you would like to see in your sector?
I’d like to see how ever-expanding types of talent are incorporated into the workforce. For example, providing more on-ramps for more diverse talent should be on everyone’s agenda – it’s good for business, it’s good for society, and it’s the right thing to do. Diversity in experience, background, and skillset helps facilitate different ways of solving problems, creating solutions, serving clients, and supporting each other. Our team here in Dublin represents over 70 nationalities, so we see firsthand how diversity supports our ability to be a hub of innovation.
AI learns from examples and the more diverse our talent is, the higher the likelihood that the AI will learn from the widest horizon of approaches and ways of working. In fact, AI accelerates the need for what a lot of companies have already begun: striving to have the widest range of talent, and thus ideas, within their organisations.
As an employer are you finding any skill gaps in the market?
We often say at Workday that “talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.” So, we’re focusing more on skills and defining experience through a broader horizon of ways of showing capabilities instead of prioritising job titles and following historical hiring patterns. For example, our enhanced “Returners Programme” offers career return opportunities in areas like app development and corporate sales, where we seek relevant skills and then provide a personalised onboarding experience for the returner, including mentoring and training, further bolstered by collaboration with supportive external organisations such as the Women in Tech Forum.
We hope that our efforts here will not only open up new opportunities for returners, but also encourage other organisations to see what’s possible. Nonlinear career paths are increasingly normal, yet many companies still have the traditional hiring practices and career progression frameworks and they overlook the untapped wisdom and experience of career returners.
How has the COVID-19 crisis affected your business/sector?
One customer told me that it used to take 6 to 12 months to review or alter a long-held HR practice. But, during the pandemic, they had 1 to 3 days to discuss, review, redefine, and implement changes big and small. This level of agility is something that HR leaders and teams had never experienced before and was required for all the challenges HR had to navigate through – including the transition to work-from-home for some areas of the business, continual iteration of HR processes and policies, and adaptation of teams and work plans to focus on the business’ most pressing needs. However, this agility was and still is reactive. Now, in the post COVID world, the business expects that same agility and speed to continue, but the real opportunity is in delivering proactive agility to solve ever-evolving challenges related to people and work.
How do you define success and what drives you to succeed?
It begins with our incredible customers trusting us to be their partners in solving their next generation of HR challenges. These are complex issues with no simple solutions, requiring continuous iteration to arrive at how to deliver impact and lasting value in these critical areas. Equally important is our team’s unwavering belief in their own abilities to tackle new challenges, learn new things, partner with different systems and data types, and deliver value to new areas of the business. This combination of trust and innovation, fostered by our incredible team and our inspiring clients, is how I define success as a leader and what motivates me to lead through the challenges and strive to always elevate our performance, ourselves, and continually improve our products.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given in business?
I was so fortunate to study under Madeleine Albright, who had served as the first female US Secretary of State, while I attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She once had us chart all the biggest problems in society that we could think of. Then she said to pick three. I thought: how do you pick three, you’re dealing with so many, from famine to nuclear weapons to pandemics? And her answer to us all was, if you want to truly solve the deepest, hardest challenges, you have to focus. And if you’re lucky and all things align, maybe you will be able to actually make an impact on one, two or three of the hardest challenges, but, without focus, commitment and an understanding of the devotion required to take on the most meaningful issues, we don’t have a chance. Her advice stays with me today.
What advice would you give to others starting out in business?
There are certain stigmas and stereotypes that can be alienating, especially for women who are thinking about starting their own business. People often said to me in the early stages of HiredScore things like “oh, you’ll need a strong co-founder to complement you… someone who’s done it before or something that is a ‘true’ technologist” or “you’ll never attract top data science talent if you’re not a great data scientist yourself unless you have a data science cofounder”. I would say to anyone starting out to trust the instincts that led you to identify a unique, meaningful problem and its solution; these same instincts will help you excel in any endeavour you choose.
What have been your highlights in business over the past year?
HiredScore becoming part of Workday was a major highlight. Over half of our customers were overlapping, we had been partners for several years and were able to get to know each other and our teams through that, and especially our shared values and cultures. Since HiredScore was already deeply integrated with Workday, after the transaction closed, we were able to get right to work on creating new products and bringing value in new ways together, which has been exciting for the team and especially for our clients and the market.
On a personal level, my daughter Maya was born this Autumn and she just continues to amaze me – with new features appearing every day!
Where do you want your business/brand to be this time next year?
Workday today is your trusted partner for your people and money, and as organisations innovate in the future of work and the future of finance, we want to continue to be your partner in tackling these critical areas and their most pressing challenges. So, we have to continuously innovate. We’re already working on new incubations leveraging our responsible AI that will continue to deliver quantifiable value and high impact in key areas of transformation for our Workday clients.
What is a way you spend time outside of work and why?
For me, mentoring is something I pursue in my spare time. When I started HiredScore, I had no background in HR or entrepreneurship. I remember sending about 20 emails to various people asking if they could connect me with any other technology start-up founders. I got more replies than I imagined offering to connect me to people they knew in the start-up ecosystem and I was so surprised and grateful that these leaders and builders offered their time to me – to give me advice, share their experience, offer connections, and help me succeed in my dream of building a company that addressed challenges I cared about. So, today, I try to do the same with typically first-time founders or people dreaming of leaving their jobs to start companies.
What is your mantra for life?
“Default to action”. There are so many urgent and critical challenges that we can and should find new ways to approach and solve that matter greatly to the people that experience them. And while we can always be frustrated at what we see around us, how can we instead break things down into areas we can take action and focus on what we might be able to change, even if slowly and over-time
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