In 2017, Shannon Morales was confident her career was on the rise.
She had been in corporate finance for three years, working her way from internships to full-time positions at several different companies. As an Afro-Latina woman and first-generation college grad, she was proud to be succeeding in a predominantly white and male industry.
Then, after two years at one New Jersey company, her boss accused her of falsifying her performance reviews, saying that she couldn’t possibly have achieved everything it said she did. Morales felt his judgement was a result of the unconscious bias so many women of color face, not based on her actual abilities.
“He told me … that everything that I accomplished during that year was a lie,” she says. “And so I quit.”
MORE ON LOCAL COMPANIES BREAKING DIVERSITY BARRIERS
Morales realized she’d have few advancement opportunities if she stayed at a company that denied her abilities. But the experience of blatant workplace bias also sparked an idea. She would fulfill her lifelong goal of becoming an entrepreneur and start a hiring company focused on helping Black and Latinx people get jobs in tech—a sector where they were hugely underrepresented.
In 2017, she launched Echo Me Forward to help minority candidates find jobs at companies she personally vetted. For three years, it was her side hustle—she squeezed it in while working other jobs, most recently in innovation where she helped startups and entrepreneurs work on their own business ideas.
But as she spent more time learning about the startup ecosystem, she wondered: Why couldn’t my business be a scalable multimillion dollar business? Why am I only thinking very small about the things that I could accomplish?
So in 2020, as the world was shifting around her, Morales decided to take a risk. She got accepted into Philly Startup Leader’s (PSL) accelerator program and set to work making her business her full-time gig.
She rebranded. Echo Me Forward became Tribaja, a name that combines the word “tribe” with trabaja (“work” in Spanish) to reflect the business’s new focus on building a community of Black and Latinx people interested in tech careers.
Tribaja connects equity-minded companies—those vetted by Morales and her team—with qualified candidates who are underrepresented in the tech space. In the past year, it has increased its employer partners to 55 and members to 5,000, 97 percent of whom are Black or Latinx and 67 percent of whom are women.
Morales says the business generated $200,000 in revenue last year—including a 300 percent increase in one month—and is poised to continue growing. This year, she hopes to raise $500,000 in seed funding and expand beyond Philly.
Hiring—and supporting—employees of color
Tech companies have spent years trying to diversify their workforces with little success. In 2014, tech giants Google, Apple and Microsoft began releasing diversity statistics in an effort to be more transparent about their hiring practices. That data revealed that between 2014 and 2019 the number of Black and Latinx people working in top tech firms only grew by about a percent.
Across the entire sector, things aren’t much better. A 2019 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that only 5.8 percent of U.S. software developers are Black and only 5.1 percent are Latinx. Tribaja’s website notes that of the over 900,000 unfilled tech jobs in the country only about 7 percent will be filled by Black and Latinx people.
“We try to stay away from being the first point of contact for a company that is looking to be more diverse, where they’re like okay we’re going to hire first and then start being a diverse and inclusive workplace,” Morales says. “Because it takes more than that.”
Tribaja seeks to fill this gap by vetting equity-minded employers, and connecting them to a diverse pool of talent.
Before signing a deal with a company, Morales and her team sit down with them to discuss why they want to diversify their workforce and how they already support employees of color—both during hiring processes and after they join the company. Tribaja works to make sure their members have opportunities to work in offices where they will be valued and treated fairly.
“We try to stay away from being the first point of contact for a company that is looking to be more diverse, where they’re like okay we’re going to hire first and then start being a diverse and inclusive workplace,” Morales says. “Because it takes more than that.”
If the company is a good fit, they can choose from a variety of plans, ranging from $125 to $850 per month, that offer access to Tribaja’s talent directory, the ability to post job openings, recruiting and other services. (Companies can also pay a one-time fee if they just want access to the talent directory.) Tribaja works with a range of local and national tech companies including Boomi,
