PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 4, 2014) - Piazza, a social learning and recruiting platform for tech students, today announces new capabilities on its Piazza Careers platform designed specifically to bring more women into the STEM fields. Piazza Careers for Women now helps companies target more than 65,000 women in STEM classes -- which includes 25,000 women in computer science (CS) classes -- at all of the top schools in the U.S., Canada, and in key international markets.
"There's been growing awareness about the importance of hiring more women into engineering roles, but Piazza Careers provides the means to actually do something about it," said Piazza CEO and founder, Pooja Sankar. "No other product in the world allows companies to discover and directly connect with this quality and quantity of female STEM candidates."
In 2013, Piazza expanded beyond its wildly popular social Q&A platform to introduce Piazza Careers in order to help students showcase their experience, coding skills, and coursework to potential employers. Companies jumped at the chance to reach such a highly-engaged audience of close to 600,000 of the world's best technical students.
Piazza Careers for Women takes the platform one step further by enabling companies to actively seek out the brightest women across hundreds of campuses. Organizations can run searches on Piazza like "Find women at the top 10 CS schools that have TA'ed machine learning and have won a hackathon" or "Find female sophomores in the long tail of CS schools that have been coding since the age of 16." Recruiters then message potential candidates through Piazza to invite them to an event, connect them to a hiring manager, or invite them to apply for a job or internship.
Piazza developed specialized search features after hearing resoundingly from female STEM students that they want new ways to establish relationships with future employers. Students also asked to connect with mentors who could provide unique insight into what it's like to work in their chosen fields or what types of classes and activities provide the best training for the real world. Additionally, they wanted a source of encouragement to help overcome the intimidation often associated with male-dominated programs. Piazza Careers for Women delivers on all counts.
"I know exactly how hard it is to be a woman in tech, from my start as one of only three women in a competitive CS program to creating and scaling my own company. It is incredibly important on a personal level to make sure that the next generation of women is afforded every possible opportunity," noted Pooja. "We are thrilled that Piazza can be a leader in the movement to attract and retain more talented women in STEM."
To learn more about Pooja's story and why she is an advocate for women in STEM, please visit https://piazza.com/about/story.
About Piazza
Piazza is a free online gathering place where students can ask and answer questions 24/7, under the guidance of their instructors. Close to 600,000 technical students per year average 2-3 hours per day on Piazza working together in real time with classmates and instructors to find the answers they need at the time they need them. Piazza recently launched its Careers platform to connect companies looking for the world's best computer science and engineering students with Piazza's highly engaged and targeted database.
For more information, please go to www.piazza.com or visit recruiting.piazza.com
