For years, companies told Toast they couldn't find qualified women in tech. Toast had 35,000 of them. The bottleneck wasn't candidate supply — it was that hiring teams had no way to reach people who had already put their hand up. That's what the Toast Talent Marketplace is built to solve.
"You can't start a marketplace with an empty supply side, and 35,000 women didn't opt in because we built software," says April Hicke, founder and CEO. "They opted in because we were placing people and they knew what we were for."
Three years of recruitment gave Toast something most hiring platforms can't manufacture: a community of women in tech who had already put their hand up to be found. The marketplace, launching October 1, makes that community available to every hiring team at once — without the human bottleneck of one recruiter, one role, one client at a time.
The insight behind the product came from watching where the actual problem lived. Companies kept telling Toast they couldn't find qualified women in tech. "We had them," Hicke says. "What they were missing was a way to reach people who had already put their hand up. That's the whole product."
The tool integrates directly with existing ATS systems, so candidates surface inside the workflow hiring teams already use. Search works best, it turns out, when you paste in the job description rather than build a boolean string — a finding from the alpha that changed what the team prioritized. "When you take the jargon out, the hiring manager can use it themselves," Hicke says. "They know what they need better than anyone, they just don't know how to phrase it in query syntax."
The women Toast surfaces often weren't in anyone's pipeline to begin with — not because they were screened out, but because they never applied. People don't apply when they don't meet every listed requirement, or when they can't see anyone like them at a company, or when they're not actively looking at all. "Our community opted in specifically to be found," Hicke says. "That's a different thing from applying to a role."
ZayZoon, a Calgary-based earned wage access platform, is among the companies that used the marketplace in alpha. "Our tech stack has a smaller talent pool, so we're always hunting for ways to find people we wouldn't normally come across," says Mary Papagiannis, senior manager of talent acquisition at ZayZoon. "The marketplace gives us a way to tap into Toast's existing network without paying an agency fee for it." The cost surprised her most. "I expected to pay agency-level rates for access to a network like that, and it's a fraction of the price."
Toast is launching the marketplace on October 1 — the same day it hosts Toast Summit, Canada's only annual conference for women in tech, in Calgary. The timing and location are deliberate. "The conversation about women in tech usually defaults to Toronto or Vancouver," Hicke says, "when Calgary is now one of the fastest-growing tech talent markets in North America."
Calgary is also where Toast was built — and Hicke credits that with shaping the company in ways a larger market might not have. "Capital is harder to raise in Calgary, so we sold recruitment services first and built software off the back of a real business. That's the only reason the pivot was possible."