Courtesy Paris Wallace

Courtesy Paris Wallace

At 70 employees strong, the Boston-based digital company Ovia Health is on the smallish-but-mighty size compared to the rest of the local tech hub. Competing for talent is tough. While those companies contend for candidates with the most gold-plated of Ivy League credentials, Ovia decided to chart a different path. Two years ago, the leadership team, including cofounder and CEO Paris Wallace (MBA 2007), dropped all degree requirements for new hires and shifted to a skills- or competency-based focus. Particularly in a place like Massachusetts, land of the highly educated, Wallace says the move has boosted the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and turned into a competitive advantage.

Ovia is among a handful of companies that are rethinking their screening process, for reasons that range from social impact to strategic imperative. IBM’s “new collar” program is one example on a large corporate scale; it creates points of entry for people who lack traditional credentials. The pool of people in this category is vast: Any job posting that requires applicants to have a college diploma automatically screens out about two-thirds of American workers. It’s a particularly expensive practice for employers, who pay up to 30 percent more to hire graduates for middle-skills work even when individuals without degrees perform equally or nearly as well, according to “Dismissed by Degrees: How Degree Inflation Is Undermining US Competitiveness and Hurting America’s Middle Class,” by Professor Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman, a program director and senior researcher at HBS’s Managing the Future of Work project.

The impact of the practice cuts most deeply for the 76 percent of Black and 83 percent of Latino workers who don’t have college degrees, according to US census data. Together, they make a pool of millions who will never be called in for that interview, no matter their skills. “It’s to the point where not having a bachelor’s degree is as bad as having a felony on your record,” Wallace observes. But on the flip side, there are vast opportunities for companies like Wallace’s that are willing to rethink their screening process.

Ovia Health, which was bought by the clinical laboratory network Labcorp in August, offers fertility, pregnancy, and parenting programs on a mobile-first platform. The company has grown 200 percent in the last two years, which means that all employees are “really focused on efficiency,” Wallace says. They developed a multilayered interview process to match the right person for each job, as the wrong hire can be extremely costly. It culminates with a two- or three-hour exercise that simulates the work for which a candidate is being considered. Someone applying for a marketing manager position might be asked to develop a multi-channel pitch and presentation in response to an RFP from a particular brand, for example. “We’re not saying we think this person can do the job; we have a solid example of their work by that point,” he emphasizes.

The switch to skills-based hiring has helped diversify Ovia’s workforce. The leadership team is 60 percent non-white and 80 percent women, as is the staff, which Wallace describes as mission-critical. He founded the company in response to the disparities that exist in women’s health in the United States, which has the worst rate of maternal mortality of any industrialized nation. Women of color are four times more likely to die in the delivery room. “People theorize that 50 percent to 75 percent of that is avoidable, and that’s something we as a company are committed to changing,” he says. The organization’s mission, to elevate the standard of care for families and women, applies equally to its partners and clients but also starts from within.

That focus on representation also leads to stronger product offerings. As an example, Wallace cites the advantage of having Spanish speakers on the staff and leadership team. “It means we’re developing a bilingual service from the beginning.” Beyond being the right thing to do, it’s critical to Ovia’s competitive advantage, he acknowledges: “If we’re going to design for the unique problems that our users have, our staff has to represent our users.”

For all of these reasons, DEI goals are baked into Ovia’s work and culture at every level, from hiring to the bonus structure. Ten percent of an employee’s annual bonus is tied to hitting the organization’s DEI targets. Those metrics are reported monthly, alongside revenue and growth, and every division’s key performance indicators on diversity roll up to the company’s balanced scorecard. Everyone gets paid out if the company meets its diversity goals. So if the product team doesn’t reach its mark, their bonuses don’t either. “What that does is say that DEI is important to everyone and everything we do,” Wallace says.

For a small company competing in a tight market, Ovia is counting on it being a winning strategy, and it has to start with getting the right people in the door. “The whole point of diversity is that you have the most diverse and best ideas,” Wallace says. “If you have a diverse team and a great culture, you’re going to be able to outperform everyone in your space, no question about it. That’s the way we think about it.”

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