When it comes to hiring a diverse team, for Gig Wage founder and CEO Craig Lewis, a company will make it a priority and make it happen, or it’s not. And working in an industry that encompasses workers from nearly all races, ages and walks of life, he sees diversity as one of his startup’s top priorities.
Hot off a roughly $10 million extended Series A round, Gig Wage is looking to build out its business and team, aiming to triple its headcount by the end of the year potentially. Last week, NTX Inno talked with Lewis about the startup’s plans to ensure diversity in its workforce as it expands and why he feels it’s important not only for Gig Wage but also for every company.
“Ultimately, diversity is good business. I think diversity is an innovation multiplier. I think diversity is a revenue driver. These are business decisions we are making for sure and are being really intentional about it,” Lewis said. “I think if you can have the right group of diverse minds, peoples, cultures and we can build that into the product that serves a diverse customer base; I think you’re just going to be able to innovate at a level that a lot… may not because we just see things from all the way around the table.”
Gig Wage has been experiencing rapid growth, seeing about 30 percent month-over-month growth in “all facets of its business” last year, Lewis said. Green Dot Corp. led the company’s Series A, giving Gig Wage a strategic partner to serve as an infrastructure bank for the fintech startup’s gig work payroll platform. With the ability to reach potentially thousands of new customers and with the upcoming rollout of its own debit card, Gig Wage expects to facilitate close to $1 billion in payments each month by the start of 2022.
The new funding has will also allow Gig Wage to grow its team. Last month, the company, which launched in 2016 as Visage Payroll, before turning its focus to payroll solutions and rebranding as Gig Wage in 2017, had about 10 employees. By the end of the year, it is hoping to bring on between 20 and 30 new members.
“Forever, it seemed… like a one-man band with contractors, and next thing you know, we had a few employees, and we ran it with like five or six people for quite a while,” Lewis said. “As we continue to grow and expand, that number will grow more and more. It’s exciting, and the enthusiasm behind the people wanting to come and work here is flattering, to say the least.”
It starts with intentionality
For this new wave of hires, which will mostly be split between products and operations and sales and marketing, the company plans to ensure that at least 25 percent of those hires are Black and at least 50 percent are women. Lewis notes that in future years, Gig Wage will likely put its focus on other underrepresented groups.
“A lot of it starts with… you. Just get it done,” Lewis said. “It’s a flag that we’ve planted in the ground. I’ve made it very clear to my team what our goals are what our focus is, and then you kind of put processes in place around that.”
One of the first things Gig Wage did to make sure it meets its hiring goals was to bring on Carolina Armstrong as its new director of people and culture, overseeing workforce initiatives are met, as well as appointing its chief strategy officer Ethan Austin as a “DEI champion.” However, Lewis notes that hiring diverse starts and ends with him as a business leader.
The company recently posted its first batch of seven jobs online, careful about the language and formatting to remove any unconscious bias. And within days, Gig Wage had to cut them off after receiving more than 1,000 applications. With that many candidates, Lewis said the company tracks the data to ensure that at least 50 percent of candidates meet the company’s goals, which studies have shown increases the likelihood of hiring underrepresented founders.
“It’s not just about posting or looking at the data. It’s about driving the data, making it happen,” Lewis said. “It’s just like any other business initiative. Either you’re going to do it and make it mandatory and important, or you’re not.”
When looking to grow, many traps companies, tiny startups, can fall into. Among those are the need to scale rapidly and the lack of access to networks of diverse talent. When it comes to scaling, Lewis said companies need to focus on “building something special” rather than on building it quickly. He also said that having more diversity at the decision-making table will help expand companies’ talent pools with more diverse candidates, adding that intentionality in seeking out where to find diverse talent is key, similar to ensuring one post on a job board engineers when trying to hire an engineer.
“It’s not just about speed; it’s about urgency. And I think the same urgency that you want to hire that senior developer, that same urgency that you want to hire that UX person, you have to have that same urgency in wanting to build a diverse team,” Lewis said. “Entrepreneurs… at the end of the day are supposed to solve problems either you want to do it, or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse not to.”
Geography as diversity
Though he jokes that being a Black founder helps broaden your network, Lewis is looking to expand Gig Wage’s as most of its new hires are remote positions. In addition to being the type of work many in the tech world are turning to, Lewis said increasing geographic diversity also brings different ways of thinking about the world to the table and expands a company’s potential talent pool globally.
“I’m big on geography. I think where you choose to build your company matters,” Lewis said. “We will hire from anywhere. If you have a MacBook or you're willing to use the one I’m going to give you, you can work for Gig Wage.”
While remote work brings its own set of challenges, Lewis said creating and maintaining company culture comes from a straightforward, top-down framework of ways the company communicates and its norms, something aided by having leadership positions dedicated to focusing on and maintaining that. Lewis also notes that there several Gig Wage investors and board members he has only met virtually. Overall, Lewis said company culture, even when the staff is remote, needs to grow organically, guided by hiring those who share similar missions, passions and drives.
“I decided to make an investment in someone who will own that,” Lewis said. “Culture: you have it whether you’re intentional or not. They’re organic, and you bring in a new person remotely, which adds to the culture. Then, you try to iterate and optimize.”
‘We are our customer’
For Lewis, hiring diverse is not just about creating more inclusion and equity (though those are huge parts of it). It’s also about keeping up with the needs and demands of the customer's Gig Wage serves. He said, with trends accelerated by the pandemic, people of all generations are using gig-work services. Those providing those services are increasingly coming from all walks of life, whether for job flexibility or supplemental income.
There’s a “macroeconomic shift that is a result of modern technology… all leading to the explosion of the gig economy,” that “requires not only new ways of thinking and new processes but new technology,” Gig Wage’s website states. And Lewis sees making sure the team developing that technology is as diverse as the clients it serves.
“I think [being diverse and remote] does help with a modernness of understanding of how work gets done as we build into the product because we are our customer, essentially. I think it’s a huge advantage for us,” Lewis said. “The gig economy steps up to the plate to meet all these kind of behavioral, generational type opportunities. We’re just primed and really ready to power a lot of that stuff.”
