StoriesHow PeopleFirst Leadership Powers Growth at Ascend
Ascend brings Alpine’s PeopleFirst leadership to life, showing how people-first private equity can drive growth while preserving integrity.
AirDNA, a short-term rental intelligence business with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Barcelona, Spain, was acquired by predictis in 2022. At the time, the multinational company was expanding fast. Its executive team, including Senior Director of People Operations Anna Westcot and CEO Demi Horvat, saw a clear need for more equitable and inclusive hiring practices. In response, AirDNA took a cue from Alpine Investors’ Playbook and created an OPP for its 2023 diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) programming. This included goals for the year to (1) increase gender diversity in the company’s tech workforce and leadership team and (2) to promote racial diversity in the company’s U.S. offices, through inclusive hiring practices.
New Pipelines For Development
Compared to men, women are less likely to apply for a job if they don’t meet 100% of the criteria. This self-elimination can prevent talented candidates from ending up in positions where they could succeed. Knowing this, AirDNA took steps to target populations who wouldn’t otherwise apply for open tech roles. In 2023, the company added a sentence to all its job postings explicitly encouraging candidates who don’t check all the boxes to apply anyway. “We wanted to make sure it was really clear that candidates don’t have to have all of the pieces in order to be considered,” says Westcot.
For BIPOC tech professionals, formal education is another common employment barrier. In addition to its amended hiring practices, AirDNA partnered with Multiverse, a diversity-focused apprenticeship company, to identify and later hire candidates for its tech apprentice program. In 2024, AirDNA hopes to continue its relationship with Multiverse to create more employment opportunities for BIPOC tech workers with non-traditional backgrounds.
DEIB Trainings
DEIB efforts don’t end at the hiring process: Fostering an inclusive workplace culture is equally important. Even the most well-intentioned employees can inadvertently perpetuate harmful biases. In the past year, AirDNA set out to combat this with mandatory DEIB trainings conducted by an expert consultant. With its 2023 DEIB goals in mind, the company took a top-of-funnel approach: Hiring managers learned new strategies to mitigate their own biases during the interview process and assess diverse candidates more equitably.
These training sessions provided a safe, judgment-free space for AirDNA employees to ask questions—and potentially get things wrong. “Fear of making a mistake or offending people is a common pitfall in the DEIB sphere,” says Westcot. “Sometimes, people get nervous talking about these programs. But having those open conversations and making people feel comfortable enough to start a dialogue matters a lot.”
Diverse Talent
AirDNA’s ongoing DEIB initiatives have led to a more diverse workforce. AirDNA hired 61 people in 2023—45% of whom were non-males in tech and 30% of whom were BIPOC U.S.-based employees. Through acquisitions, the company gained an additional 47 employees. Today, 17.8% of the company’s total tech workforce is non-male; 17.5% of all U.S.-based workers are BIPOC.
AirDNA’s leadership team is now over 50% non-male, which brings the company closer to its goal of true gender parity. AirDNA plans to work with hiring managers to ensure that all job postings for leadership roles are shared internally as well as externally. Although promoting internally is not always viable, expanding growth opportunities for existing employees can help level the playing field.
“Fear of making a mistake or offending people is a common pitfall in the DEIB sphere. Sometimes, people get nervous talking about these programs. But having those open conversations and making people feel comfortable enough to start a dialogue matters a lot.”
Anna Westcot, Senior Director of Operations, AirDNA
