Leslie Miley, the engineering manager who left Twitter over the way senior executives at the company were talking about diversity, is now the director of engineering at a recruiting software startup called Entelo. Entelo, which has over 350 customers, including tech companies like Box, Facebook, Uber, Tesla, Zenefits, Pinterest and Yelp, is a software platform that helps businesses recruit employees. A couple of years ago, the company introduced a diversity tool that enables companies to specifically search for women, racial minorities and veterans.
“I could see the potential of the product not just from a diversity standpoint, but from the standpoint of a hiring manager and I’ve hired over a hundred people,” Miley told me. He later added, “as I started to meet the team, I noticed there was an alignment of values.”
Entelo talks the talk and walks the walk, Miley said. When you look around the company, Miley says that you can see it’s a company of diverse people. And it’s not just a diverse group of ethnicities and genders, but also includes people with different educational backgrounds.
“If you start from a core of people who aren’t all from the same six schools, [the company] has diversity at its core,” Miley said. “When you look at the breakdown of gender and ethnicity in the engineering organization, even though it’s smaller than a Google or Palantir or Pinterest, it is diverse now, which means that for us, we have to keep it this way. We’re not going to fall back. We’re going to keep looking for people who are diverse and that to me means [diversity is] at its core. It is because you start from diversity. You don’t try to add it on.”
Entelo is a relatively small company in comparison to Twitter, Apple and Google — three major tech companies Miley has worked for. Last year, the company had about 20 people. Today, Entelo’s headcount is around 65 people.
“I’ve been at mostly small companies that either became large companies or were acquired by large companies,” Miley said. “Any successful outcome I’ve had at a company has been about the team. It’s never been about the product. When you start recognizing how good the team is, well, it doesn’t ensure that things are going to end positively, but it’s a better indicator than how good the product is. In this case, I saw a really good team and a really good product.”
As director of engineering, Miley’s goals are to accelerate hiring and continue building a great engineering culture. With fewer than 100 employees, Entelo is at a great size to set the foundation for what its company culture will be like. Instead of culture fit, which “can be used to exclude,” Entelo CEO Jon Bischke said, the company tries to focus more on culture add and how potential hires can make the team better. With Miley in a leadership position and Bischke’s views on culture, the company is in a good position to set an example for young, venture-backed companies around diversity and inclusion.
Of the nine Entelo employees that have director or more senior positions, two of them are African-American, and three are female, Bischke said.
“From my perspective, it’s really important that people inside the organization are seeing diversity from all levels,” Bischke said. “And I think that’s great too because it gives people lower down in the organization, on the org chart, something to aspire to. They can see that they’re not capped.”