HiredScore CEO and founder Athena Karp.
Athena Karp. Image: John Ohle Photography

Bias, technology and breaking down tradition

5 Feb 2025

Athena Karp didn’t purposefully cultivate a career in the STEM field, but that’s where her desire to have an impact brought her.

“I never thought of my journey as intentionally STEM-focused,” explained Athena Karp, the founder and CEO of AI technology company HiredScore and the general manager of HiredScore at Workday, which acquired the company last year. “Instead, I pursued areas that interested me and that I found empowering, which incidentally led me into the world of technology.”

Having attended Georgetown University, where she studied international politics, she concentrated on courses in the science, technology and international affairs department and upon graduation joined the technology, media and telecom team at an investment bank, specialising in technology mergers and acquisitions. But it was 2012 when she made the decision to leave her role at Altaris Capital Partners and establish her own company, HiredScore, an AI-powered talent acquisition firm.  

“My goal was clear, to solve a societal challenge that I knew we could improve, making hiring and promotions more fair and efficient. What I’ve always loved about technology is the ability to impact important problems at scale, to see things that don’t exist one day and create solutions that actually deliver results in a short span of time.”

Undermining bias

According to Karp, AI technologies have the potential to make organisational recruitment practices fair by reducing bias, but for this to be achieved, companies have to commit to the responsible use of AI. For example through patented innovations, bias audits or proactive data balancing in machine learning and training sets.

Having worked on national, international, governmental and NGO task forces providing expert opinion on how to balance innovation with safety in areas of high sensitivity, she is of the opinion that AI should always be viewed as an evolving discipline. Not a task that you can ever be ‘done with’, but rather an ongoing commitment to ensuring unbiased results. 

“At Workday, we often say that ‘talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not’. This belief was the driving force behind why I founded HiredScore over a decade ago, to make hiring fair and efficient by leveraging AI to help companies open the aperture of who they considered for new roles, breaking out of ‘copy and paste’ talent patterns to hire new types of skills, experiences and backgrounds into the organisation,” she said.

“While much of the conversation has focused on relaxing rigid degree requirements, I’m excited for the era ahead, where we rethink traditional ideas based on years of relevant or industry experience, where adjacent skills and experience can provide powerful knowledge for a role and where AI can help people onboard and transition into new types of paths and trajectories.”

For Karp, AI as an “always-on agent” can break down traditional silos in a fractured workplace, address critical gaps in the employee experience, present professionals with career growth opportunities and reduce instances of perceived unfairness. Development can be fostered at a pace aligned with the individual’s needs, in a vastly changing landscape. 

Return of the…

Just like in the majority of movie sequels, for example Return of the Jedi and The Return of the King, returnships give the protagonist, or in this case the professional, a fresh opportunity to make an impact. According to Karp – who is involved in one such returnship programme – they are an ideal way to expand the entry points through which talented people can re-enter the workforce, particularly women who are often disproportionately affected by biased hiring methods and recruitment agendas.

“As we are heavily focused on attraction, opportunity creation and support post-hire, this programme touches on all the important aspects of how we help women return to the workforce. 

“It goes beyond the initial stages of job exploration by providing preparation through the hiring process, confidence-building to competitively represent themselves and ongoing support from engaged, hiring managers and leaders across our organisation. We also work with external organisations like the Women in Tech Forum to further support returners.”

And for those looking to forge a similar path, she would like people to know that when it comes to taking a leap, “there will never be the ‘right’ time and your idea will never be ‘formed enough'”. What matters is that you get started, put everything you can into your early journey, find people you will be proud to work alongside through the victories and the challenges and stay relentless in your curiosity and learning. 

This, she finds, is especially true of the time period we are currently inhabiting, wherein we are experiencing an AI revolution of sorts. “There are so many resources to learn from and so many ways  to explore new tools without a technical background. It’s never been more affordable or more accessible to get started in AI

“Most importantly, focus on solving problems you truly care about, not just those that seem like good business opportunities,” she said. “Passion fuels curiosity, driving you to endlessly explore how an initial problem can lead you to discover new problems, uncover additional complexities and identify innovative solutions.”

When Karp first established HiredScore, she wrote a list of everyone she personally knew who also worked in tech start-ups. It was a list containing five names. 12 months later, that same list held hundreds of names, including many founders and CEOs who had been generous with their time and advice. 

“I feel I have a tremendous responsibility to pay this forward. I do whatever I can to mentor and support the next generation of entrepreneurs, especially women founders, who are building their first company, taking risks and diving into the unknown.”

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Laura Varley
By Laura Varley

Laura Varley is a Careers reporter at Silicon Republic. She has a background in technology PR and journalism and is borderline obsessed with film and television, the theatre, Marvel and Mayo GAA. She is currently trying to learn how to knit.

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