9 reasons to be hopeful about women in tech

Finding a diverse pool of candidates is a major pain point for employers, according to Jon Bischke, founder of Entelo.

"One of the things we were hearing repeatedly is that [companies] were really interested in filling their pipelines with those from underrepresented groups," he said.

Entelo is a hiring service that crawls publicly available data on social platforms for talent (so candidates don't necessarily sign up on the platform and may not even be looking for a job change).

Last year, it launched a product to help employers go one step further: create a diverse pool of applicants to interview.

The product determines the gender and race of each candidate based on identifying information, like whether they attended a predominately black college.

The San Francisco-based company has caught some flack from those who believe it's targeting individuals to fulfill company quotas. But Bischke, 39, has a different take.

"We believe you should be hiring the best people from the job out of a diverse pool of applicants," he said. If a company says they're not seeing any female candidates, for example, Entelo will find those candidates so there are no excuses.

The firm, which has raised $7 million in funding, counts tech firms like Yelp (YELP) and Microsoft (MSFT) among its clients.