Kansas sisters Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall represent a host of fellow entrepreneurs who are seeing open spaces in their respective industries and is rewriting them with their innovative ideas.
The duo saw a void in the service industry, so they started a company called QuickHire and began to fill it themselves.
“Just helping [to] create more opportunity and remove barriers for other Black women in technology,” Deborah Gladney, the co-founder of QuickHire, said.
Focused on quickly hiring strong and solid candidates in the service industry, QuickHire launched as an app in April and already has more than 60 employers using the service with over 11,000 job applicants waiting in the wings.
“We do pride ourselves on being underserved founders serving underserved workers in an underserved geographic region,” Gladney said.
As daughters of Ugandan immigrants, the service industry has impacted their lives firsthand. It was the impetus behind them building the app.
“People don’t have time to wait around for that next opportunity,” Angela Muhwezi-Hall, the COO of QuickHire said. “That may make the difference between, ‘Can I feed my family?’”
Labor shortages continue to rise as COVID-19 restrictions and the pandemic as a hold make it hard for those across the country to safely be employed.
“These are people who have faced decades of neglect, career stifling, bad pay—so many different issues. And so with COVID happening, that was just kind of the final straw for them where people have literally marched with their feet, walking out of jobs saying, ‘We will not take it anymore.’”
More than $1.4 million has been raised by the sister entrepreneurs to jump-start their company. They are also only two of just more than 100 Black women to accomplish this feat since Dec. 2020.
Their successes have resulted in welcoming new clients like Doo-Dah Diner, Fuzzy’s Tacos, and Homewood Suites to their app.
QuickHire’s aim is to help employees create lifelong careers instead of seeing the service industry as a dead end.