Kayla Michele is Co-Founder and COO of PeduL, the first “diversity hack” for corporations to source and engage with underrepresented talent through scholarship programs, thereby creating link between job seekers and job opportunities. Through her diversity hack method, upon acceptance of scholarship, the said candidate will be offered internship or a full time job.
“Since talent teams cannot post job listings targeting specific minority or underrepresented groups, we partner with corporations to create scholarships for those exact candidate profiles.”
“PeduL is a diversity recruiting marketplace that enables employers to source and attract a curated pipeline of competitive, diverse candidates whose skills match internship and entry-level job requisitions…”
PeduL was birthed in 2016 following a conversation Michele had with a friend, Chisa Egbelu while they were students at Rutgers University. They witnessed their friends struggle to land gainful employment at notable organizations while these companies also struggled with recruiting a pool of diverse talents, so they proffered the diversity hack.
Since 2020, PeduL has helped over 20,000 underrepresented minority students from colleges and universities across the country pursue meaningful careers at companies like Audible, ViacomCBS, Capital One Bank, and Synchrony Financial.
Passionate about youth empowerment, equal opportunity and a more diverse workplace, Kayla serves ambassador for youth development organizations like The Disney Dreamers Academy, The First Tee and The National Black MBA Leaders of Tomorrow and is a Forbes Next 1000 List honoree.
PeduL first started as a crowd-funding platform when she was a junior in college. Reflecting she says, “I realized I was too obsessed with the solution and not obsessed enough about the customer or the problem that I was solving,” she imparted.
“I realized after a year and half of doing interviews that I was catering to a specific audience which happened to be a middle-class, Caucasian audience that happened to have a network with money. So they had the uncle or the aunt that they could tap into for that $500 or $1000 donation towards their campaign; it was awesome because they were able to raise 7 million dollars for the first eight months, which was great, but I started this for my friends who represented me. I was like, why are all the Black and Hispanic kids not getting the same value that everybody else is on the platform,” she added.
Kayla Michele has appeared on such media outlets as NBC, Forbes, Complex and more.
