Smartly
Smartly Inclusion & Diversity
Frequently Asked Questions
Diversity is visible in Smartly’s leadership. The company is led by a female CEO, Laura Desmond, and its leadership team is predominantly composed of women. Smartly also identifies its management team as highly diverse and reports a mean gender pay gap below 10%, which signals representation at senior levels alongside attention to equity.
That representation is reinforced by systems designed to support fairness in how people grow into senior roles. Smartly uses fair hiring practices, diversity recruitment programs, mandated unconscious bias training, diversity-based employee resource groups and transparent promotion frameworks built on concrete evidence of impact. Employees are also given clear pathways for advancement through internal mobility, stretch projects and development programs, which helps create more equitable access to leadership opportunities over time.
Smartly builds fairness into hiring by implementing a multi-layered approach to ensure its hiring process remains equitable, transparent, and inclusive, focusing on structured, standardized and evidence-based recruiting processes. The company regularly reviews its recruiting, hiring, and promotion practices to support equity, reduce bias, and make expectations clear for candidates and employees.
A key part of Smartly’s approach is structured interviewing. Interviewers use behavioral and situational questions designed to assess role-relevant skills, rather than relying on informal impressions or unstructured conversations. Employees involved in hiring complete interviewer training, including guidance on unconscious bias and common evaluation risks.
Smartly also emphasizes evidence-based evaluation. Interview feedback is expected to be grounded in specific examples from the interview, such as what the candidate said, did, or demonstrated. Hiring decisions are informed by multiple interviewers and independent data points, helping ensure that no single perspective carries too much weight.
Fairness also extends to how Smartly widens access to opportunity. The company uses diversity-focused recruiting efforts, inclusive candidate communication, and flexible hiring practices to support people from different backgrounds and personal situations. Employee Resource Groups help strengthen belonging and inclusion across the business, while transparent feedback channels and leadership accessibility help employees feel heard.
The same clarity continues after hiring. Smartly uses role expectations, level frameworks, and evidence of impact to guide growth and promotion decisions. This supports a more consistent and objective approach to career development, helping employees understand what success looks like and how they can grow. Smartly experience rooted in trust, accountability, and equal opportunity.
Smartly supports belonging and inclusion through fair people processes, employee-led communities, leadership access, and flexible ways of working. It builds belonging by combining structure with everyday inclusion, helping employees feel heard, supported, and empowered to contribute.
- Fair systems: Smartly uses transparent hiring, promotion, and advancement frameworks based on clear expectations and evidence of impact, helping reduce bias and support equitable career decisions.
- Diverse leadership: Representation is visible at the highest levels, with Smartly led by a female CEO and a predominantly female leadership team.
- Inclusive hiring: Employees involved in recruitment complete unconscious bias and inclusion training, while hiring teams are encouraged to practice allyship, challenge assumptions, and create space for different perspectives. Hiring, promotion, and ways of working are designed to be fair and flexible for people from diverse backgrounds and with different personal circumstances. This commitment is reinforced through inclusive hiring practices, targeted diversity recruitment efforts, and regular reviews of policies and processes to ensure fairness, transparency, and consistency.
- Leadership voice and feedback: The company has Ask-me-anything sessions, quarterly DE&I engagement surveys, dedicated Slack channels, office events and open forums give employees regular ways to be heard and influence change
- Flexible, global connection: Smartly’s hybrid work model, global remote programs, office gatherings, and employees from 60+ nationalities help create connections across different backgrounds and locations.
Smartly Employee Perspectives
We at Smartly.io commit every day to promoting trust, equality, diversity, accountability, and learning through our work and company practices, as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility work.
One of the chosen key areas of our social initiatives is Women & Girls. We want to promote equality overall and especially in the tech industry. To put this in practice, this year we’ve deepened our partnership with Plan International, a girls’ rights organization, to support women and girls.
We’ve been thrilled to be part of meaningful celebrations of International Women’s Day, and most recently we celebrated the tenth International Day of the Girl, recognized by the United Nations.
We were privileged to have three Young People Representatives to take over a day at Smartly.io and meet our leaders, get to know our industry and business, learn and contribute, as well as get mentoring from experienced leaders. These Girls Takeovers aim to inspire and help empower the next generation of girls in their careers.
Knowledge Shares to Make an Impact
Our International Day of the Girl Takeovers took place in New York with Eva, in Singapore with Adinda, and in London with Simran. Each of the girls had a special program planned for them, covering knowledge shares around our business and digital advertising, talent acquisition, sales, and customer work, together with mentoring on how to navigate today’s corporate world and the required skills to succeed. All the girls engaged in active dialogue to gain more insights and share their experiences and opinions on a variety of topics.
Each young advocate got to experience something special: Eva in New York ran a fireside chat with our CEO Laura Desmond talking about female leadership – be it in your hobbies, first job, or at Board level. Adinda in Singapore engaged with a webinar around Girls in Tech with a group of Indonesian girls to inspire them about a career in tech. Simran, in turn, jumped into the deep end of leveraging social media for business with our social media expert.
Based on the feedback, our guests truly enjoyed their visits and felt their expectations were exceeded – which we are thrilled to deliver!
Essential Leadership Skills of Tomorrow
One of the key things we wanted the girls to take away from the Takeovers was an understanding of what is required to be a good leader in today’s world. Anyone can learn from their testimonials below!
The Value of Mentorship
Learning about the ups and downs from more experienced professionals at an early stage can have a huge impact on your future career. Here are some essential tips our Takeover participants took home with them:
- Have a positive growth mindset.
- Start using more self-confident language and limit the use of minimizing language.
- Be solution-oriented and bring constructive energy to the room.
- Ask for help.
- Understand when you have failed and what you learned from it.
- Be consistent with your beliefs and you will foster success.
- Understand who the decision-makers and influencers of the organization are.
Things all of us can put into practice!
The mentoring sessions were valuable not only to the young advocates, but also to Smartlies. Here are some of the mentions we got from Smartlies around the world:
The Work for Equality Continues
To continue creating an equal world and work life, it’s critical that girls' and young women’s voices are heard. They want to be recognized as change makers who can help them make an impact on the challenges they face globally. We can each play a part in taking the steps towards that.
If you’re ready to support girls and take on the fight against gender inequality, take Plan USA’s We Are the Girls pledge today at wearethegirls.org. Additionally, to get involved in future activations, you are also welcome to get in touch with Plan USA via email at [email protected].
Let us know how we can do our part and continue making the tech industry a better place for girls!
Smartly's Benefits
Has a diversity recruitment program
We have a partnership with Coop to help people from under represented communities get into digital media. We also have a diverse slate approach and early careers program.
Has a highly diverse management team
6 of the 9 members of our Executive Leadership Team are women
Hiring practices promote diversity
Mandated unconscious bias training
Mean gender pay gap is below 10%
Offers diversity-based Employee Resource Groups
