WORKING IT

Fuelled by first-hand experience, these female founders set out to change the game for women in the workforce. By Danielle Gay.

Fuelled by first-hand experience, these female founders set out to change the game for women in the workforce.

Two women. Two big ideas. Two Melbourne tech start-ups. For one pair it was a conversation over wine that served as a catalyst, while another duo found it was a redundancy that propelled them to start their own business. Valeria Ignatieva is the co-founder of Work180, a platform listing job vacancies from employers that have already been pre-screened for a strict checklist of criteria, from equal pay to flexible working arrangements. We profile her here alongside Lucy Lloyd, co-founder of Mentorloop, a software program that is democratising the mentoring industry.

Valeria Ignatieva, co-founder of Work180

When Valeria Ignatieva learned her son had a disability, the last thing on her mind was her career trajectory. “I was a single parent, and I had a great career,” Ignatieva recalls. “All of a sudden, I had to look at more flexible working options for myself, and I was knocked back time and time again.” Ignatieva was exposed to the shortcomings in the hiring process, which she felt wasted both her time and the resources of the organisation. “I’d be applying for jobs, and they would say things like: ‘You’re the ideal candidate, but unfortunately, we need someone nine to five.’ I got very, very discouraged … It wasn’t so much the time-wasting; it was more about the heartbreak at the end.”

It was her own experiences that informed the vision for Work180, an organisation Ignatieva co-founded in 2015 with her business partner Gemma Lloyd. And although her story dates back 10 years, Ignatieva knows that it’s a situation in which many women, as well as men, still find themselves. “We still hear from women on almost a daily basis who say things like: ‘I guess my career is over now that I’ve had two kids’ or: ‘I’ve dropped down to a less senior role because there is no flexibility.’ Our mission is to finally put an end to workplace discrimination, so everyone is valued equally, and businesses can enjoy the benefit of a truly diverse workforce.”

Work180, which last year raised $2 million from investors to support expansion into the UK and the US, is enabling candidates to take back the power, which is how the company got its name. “We’ve flipped things 180 degrees; instead of presenting your credentials to a company, they’re presenting theirs to you,” Ignatieva says.

The platform’s curated checklist focuses on factors such as paid parental leave, flexible work arrangements, professional development and equal pay. It gives candidates a snapshot of a company’s culture before they even agree to an interview. “Women are saying things like: ‘Your website has given us the confidence to reject inflexible offers … because we can have a look at who is open to discussing flexible working right up-front.’ All of this plays a big part in keeping women in the workforce.”

Work180 has also prompted organisations to make adjustments. “They are changing their policies to come on board with us and continually improve them,” Ignatieva says, citing a major tech company that removed minimum tenure for paid parental leave and one of the Big Four banks, which has introduced job-sharing at a steady rate. “A lot of organisations are doing it because it’s the right thing to do. But, obviously, diversity drives amazing business outcomes, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”

When asked whether Work180 itself has a flexible working environment, Ignatieva happily confirms that the company is a 100 per cent remote workforce. “We have a lot of people with children and other priorities, and they meet their targets, but they work the way that they work,” she says. “They don’t want special treatment; they just want equal treatment.”

Lucy Lloyd, co-founder of Mentorloop

Mentorloop started over a glass of wine between two friends. “My co-founder Heidi [Holmes] and I … were discussing our quite different careers and the choices we were making,” says Lucy Lloyd, one half of the tech start-up. “We wondered aloud why there wasn’t a dating site for mentoring relationships.” Both women felt there should be an easier way to find and connect with what Lloyd describes as “a future version of yourself” to help women navigate those next steps in any career. “We started to research this, and three years ago, we kind of went, okay, there’s definitely a business case to actually go all-in and build this into a business.”

Lloyd says that with Mentorloop they are hoping to shift the perceptions of mentoring to make it more democratic and accessible to all. Launched in 2016 with funds raised from venture capital firms Blackbird Ventures, Rampersand and Tempus Partners, Mentorloop is a software product that aims to connect the right people for the perfect mentoring relationship. “We believe it’s a reciprocal relationship – both the mentor and the mentee benefit,” she says. “We don’t believe it should ever be paid. Rather, it’s something that both parties enter into willingly, and they both get something fantastic out of it.”

Mentorloop aims to remove the guesswork from finding a mentor. Businesses ask their employees who would like to have a mentor and then use the program to collect data to match the right mentors with the right mentees. “We take them through a questionnaire that helps them untangle or uncover the ‘why’ of mentoring for them,” says Lloyd.

Organisations can also tailor the program to target key areas in the business. “They might run mentoring for diversity and inclusion, so it might be around getting more women into senior leadership in their company,” says Lloyd. “Or they might run it for a skills exchange, to upskill people on delivering a certain type of professional service or being able to negotiate deals.”

Lloyd and her business partner Holmes started with $75,000 of their own funds, and they’ve now expanded the company into North America and the United Kingdom, with further room for growth. And they’re showing proven results for companies, too. “Mentoring tends to boost retention rates by around 70 per cent for both mentors and mentees,” Lloyd claims. “Employees who are mentored are five times more likely to be promoted than those who weren’t. The companies that are going to win in the next couple of decades are the ones who put their people first.”

Lloyd, who calls her own mentors her “personal advisory board”, insists the concept can work only if it’s available to all. “We believe the right connection can change your life, but we need to make it more relevant to everyone,” she says. “It brings people off the sidelines. It provides insight and changes your thinking.”

To find out more about Valeria Ignatieva’s and Lucy Lloyd’s appearances at Vogue Codes, go to vogue.com.au/codes.