Startup CEO 4 Hire, founder, entrepreneur, lawyer, and humanitarian on venturing into a brave new world: American minority business owners solving the underrepresented and underpaid crisis in corporate American business. (Official launch is Summer 2018. Pardon our appearance. We are optimizing.) The first legal job offer I received after law school, was at a real estate firm, located just a few minutes away from the New York Stock Exchange. I was excited about the location. New York's Financial District was home for me, and I was proud of having found the opportunity on my own. The interview with a male partner lasted for more than an hour, and went well enough. Finally, I received the offer. It came with a salary of $800 per week, without "fringe benefits" - no healthcare, vacation, sick days, retirement, bonus, or transportation to name a few.
I'm a reasonable woman, but I'm a damn good employee. Needless to say, I didn't take the job. I have worked at some of the best known companies and brands in American business, and no doubt at a fraction of the salary offered to other candidates - I am both a woman and a person of color. This was my reality as a skilled and educated woman of color seeking to enter corporate America. On the other side, I saw non-minority peers offered higher wages and a plethora of fringe benefits, but they were less-skilled, and their records had not been vetted. How is it that the 45th President of the United States and First Lady were able to feign education they hadn't attained, and it was only discovered in 2016? This failure to vet but eager to hire and promote mentality is the reality for a sweeping majority of non-minority candidates seeking to enter corporate America today. America: we're supposed to be leading the free world, but discrimination in hiring and corporate greed is holding us back. Staffing agencies: many of you are doing a great disservice to an able-bodied, qualified, skilled workforce. Startup CEO 4 Hire will address this. Startup CEO 4 Hire just wants to get qualified, skilled, hard working, morally-inclined, educated, healthy, well-groomed, innovative individuals greater representation and back to work. The last straw for me was being offered a contract position at an American company that I admired at a salary less than the male who held the position a week before me. That male had been asked to leave. To make matters more injurious, my first task as a contract employee was to complete more than a year's worth of work for two corporate counsels that had been leftover from a departed permanent male hire who held that role prior to the male that I replaced. The professionals we work with are self-motivated, constantly improving, innovative, creative, goal-oriented, inspiring, well-groomed, experienced, and resilient. As a matter of principle, our professionals do not engage in or make excuses to the following:
People are the new business currency. The people you hire represent your brand and your values. Behind every great idea and invention are great people. Our professionals would never be splashed across headlines for assaulting an Uber driver, attending a hate march, threatening someone online, sexually harassing co-workers, laundering money, or violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Our professionals represent our brand. Ethics are at the core of our business. I am content to rise slower than my peers, if that means carefully vetting sources of money and the professionals that represent this brand. At Startup CEO 4 Hire, we do not believe that doing whatever it takes to succeed in business includes and justifies criminal acts, anti-human tactics, or morally reprehensible behavior. I am a (small d) democratic capitalist. I am not willing to sacrifice business ethics or my humanitarian views to reach my goal a day sooner. Such leanings - greed, power lust, anti-human activities - are un-American and are self destructive. Today I am growing my own solution to the underrepresented and underpaid problem in American business. We are a young startup, but we are evolving and innovating at high speed. We are committed to pairing great professionals with companies and investors that play fair. We are not in the practice of sending our professionals to companies that seek to enable poor hiring choices by hiring a qualified candidate at low pay to do the work of an employee who should have been fired yesterday. Rip off the band-aid and restaff with a qualified candidate. I once saw an ad that read: "If you had all the money in the world, we'd all start using something else." That is where I see my brand today. Greed today largely controls who has access to capital and markets in the U.S., so our professionals and our brand are using something else: raw talent, experience, business intelligence, morals, humility, a network of like-minded professionals, patience - and yes, capital from some very generous humanitarians. Right now, we (Startup CEO 4 Hire) are innovating the mother load of startups. You haven't read about it yet because we aren't waiting for corporate giants to give us a seat at the table, we're building one from scratch.
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