Niani Tolbert makes sure Black women work

Niani Tolbert (Contributed)

By Shania DeGroot

“I wanted to make sure that people who looked like my mother were not overlooked,” said Niani Tolbert, the 27-year-old founder of HireBlack, an employment agency and recruiting service dedicated to ensuring that Black women not only receive jobs, but also feel valued at work.

When the pandemic arrived in 2020, Tolbert, who had been laid off from her previous job as a technical recruiter at Equinox, was looking for work and had a lot of free time, so she decided to post a message on her Linked-in page on Juneteenth wanting help with resume evaluations for 19 Black women.