Black women are “gettin’ to the money.”
Niani Tolbert, 29-year-old founder and CEO of #HireBlack, an initiative she created to provide career resources for Black women, has turned the mission into her full-time job.
#HireBlack works to connect high-performing diverse talent with companies and organizations through hiring events and career workshops. In addition, the initiative offers an annual summit and a job board. The website informs that the job board is the place where Black women can get notified of new job postings, discover remote and hybrid jobs, get discovered by top recruiters, and more.
According to CNBC Make It, Tolbert along with her employees work with mega companies including Amazon, Uber, and Disney to get Black women hired, committing to their mission to help close the pay gap.
“Wealth is not about assets, it’s about access: access to information, access to resources,” she explains to CNBC.
The racial justice movement during
the 2020 pandemic was a leading factor in Tolbert’s inspiration to lend her time as a recruiter to help other women like her find work. Volunteering her efforts on LinkedIn to review the resumes of 19 Black women in honor of Juneteenth, she says gave her “a sense of purpose when everything else felt unstable.”The #HireBlack initiative has reached goals in increasing the collective wages by more than $2 million. Tolbert reports that some women have received up to $60,000 in pay raises. Through Slack groups and coaching sessions her team provides Black women with clarity on the unique necessities of pay and non-monetary benefits. CNBC also provides Tolbert’s views on the importance of building a “money team,” a network of experienced friends or colleagues in their industry, and a “brag book,” a portfolio of accomplished works.
“Ultimately, Black women have to be their own best advocate in the workplace,” she says. “We want to arm them with all the information, resources and encouragement they need to lead a successful negotiation.”