Tech & Innovation Blog
Celebrate with ADP: National STEM/STEAM Day
Impact, Culture, How We Work
Consider volunteering, joining mentorship programs, and giving back to the communities!
Celebrate with ADP: National STEM/STEAM Day
November 8th is National STEM/STEAM Day! Celebrate with ADP and learn how we participated in various events, supporting technologists across the globe.
ADP associates at Grace Hopper Celebration
Supporting Young Talents & Women in Tech
ADP associates from New York and New Jersey volunteered at HackJA, a 24-hour hackathon with more than 100 high school students participating during the last school year. Our associates helped with students’ projects and reviewed the final submissions. The students were assigned challenges related to computer science and information technology. It was an excellent opportunity for young talents to participate in workshops and meet mentors from diverse backgrounds.
“I liked the different activities we could do. I had fun using VR and learning more about Python,” says Jane, a 9th-grade student. “I applied my previous knowledge at the event. I also learned how to be a group leader and split work up evenly,” says Kush, an 11th-grade student.
To encourage women in pursing tech careers, ADP sponsored three scholarships through the Women in Tech (WIT) organization, promoting STEM opportunities. We provide annual scholarships for female leaders who devote their careers to advancing technology.
“At ADP, we are passionate about nurturing and fostering female talents. We believe this is the key in moving our workplace forward,” says Melanie Shook, Vice President at ADP and executive sponsor for WIT on behalf of ADP. “These scholarship investments, through our partnership with WIT, are one way we look to advance technology talents forward.”
ADP sponsored three $5,000 WIT Campus scholarships this year, with ADP’s GPT business unit representatives attending the check award ceremony. “I am extremely thankful to have been chosen as one of the scholarship recipients by ADP and WIT Campus. This money allows me to continue my education at Georgia Gwinnett College and pay off my student loans. It also allows me to connect with many amazing women who were there to support me,” says Briana Hickson, one of the ADP Scholarship winners. Watch the full award recognition video here.
ADP continues sponsoring conferences such as the Grace Hopper Celebration by AnitaB.org and virtual AfroTech Conference happening the week of November 8th, supporting the future generation of technologists.
AfroTech Conference Sponsored by ADP
Get Inspired: Mentorship Program & The Future
We encourage our associates to keep learning and discovering. ADP started the Inspire Business Resource Group, a community mission to imagine, question, and empower. The global group has more than 3,000 associates from 30 countries who actively develop innovative ideas in conversations. The group hosts creative activities such as speaker series, inspired challenges, and innovative discussions. New members are always welcome!
ADP launched the Women in Technology Leadership (WiTL) mentoring program in 2020, providing development opportunities for women technologists. The program pairs Global Product & Tech (GPT) women from different leadership levels with three goals in mind. One goal is to advance diversity and inclusion. Another goal is to increase, retain, and develop top, diverse talents. The third goal is to create a talent pipeline for future leadership roles.
“The program provided a fantastic opportunity for women in leadership to connect and share their experiences. I found it rewarding and inspiring,” one attendee shared. “I gained valuable insights on how I handle challenges in my job. The experience brings confidence and broadens my network.”
Initiatives such as WiTL have helped ADP earn recognition from different organizations. We are named the 2020 and 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category from AnitaB.org. Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose ADP as one of the Top 50 US companies they would like to work for and believe it provides a positive working environment for women engineers.
Communities: Giving Back
It is about sharing knowledge and giving back to our communities. ADP’s UX team from Pasadena provided mentorship and training support to STEAM:CODERS, a California-based non-profit organization with a mission to inspire underrepresented students and their families through STEAM. Our associates invited the participants to our office before the pandemic and provided user experience research and design training as a part of the Design Thinking course.
NJIT Women Hackathon
During the pandemic, ADP sponsored a first all-female 48-hour hackathon in partnership with Major League Hacking, a 24-hour hackathon with New Jersey Institute of Technology Girl Hacks, and a national non-profit organization, Girls Who Code, supporting girls and women in the tech community.
Celebrate National STEM Day with us! Consider volunteering, joining mentorship programs, and giving back to the communities.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our tech blog! #ADPTech
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background.
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
By Giselle Mota, Principal, Future of Work
With more than 900,000 clients around the globe, we at ADP often notice shifts in the working world relatively early on—and that was certainly the case with the increase in corporate attention toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. To help our clients and internal teams track DEI, we launched the DEI Dashboard in December 2020, which offers insights and actionable recommendations to form more substantial teams.
Giselle speaking on TED Talk.
Getting Started: Data-driven insights
The ADP team tackles the DEI with a natural approach from a metrics point of view; we have always been a data-driven organization. By gathering time and attendance information, we can give clients helpful insights into things like managing overtime costs so they can make operational decisions. Our human resources platforms contain a wealth of demographics, including team members’ races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and disability statuses. What’s more is we help our clients understand the employee experience throughout their entire lifecycle, from interviewing, onboarding, leadership development to compensation and retirement.
Going Deeper: A push for accountability
Our team added filtering options that allow clients to get more granular with their newfound insights. One such resource is our new Candidate Relevancy app, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help recruiters organize the thousands of résumés they receive. This tool has become critical for helping mitigate unconscious biases. We train the model to eliminate discrimination by focusing only on the skills and competencies needed for the roles. At the same time, we’ve made sure all hiring managers have access to make human decisions on pursuing candidates. The same is true with our AI-driven Chatbots that provide pre-screening functions for recruiters.
Giselle M.
Looking Inward: ADP’s journey
Our team recognized the DEI Dashboard project as transformative for both our clients and for ourselves. Like many organizations, we have long championed diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we knew there was room for a renewed and enhanced approach—and it had to begin with the people creating the DEI Dashboard.
While our Data Science team took the lead on the initial build of the platform, we brought in experts from each of our products to help us understand how we could reimagine through a DEI lens. Our goal was to expand on EEOC requirements and consider anything relevant to our clients and their employees, creating more equity across the recruiting space.
With our goals in mind, the insights we gathered from the DEI Dashboard on ADP have led to several new initiatives and processes, including surveys, mentorship, leadership development programs for underrepresented groups, and the job auditing process for discriminatory languages. Not only did we hire recruiters who specialize in finding diverse talents, but we also focused on disability inclusion, from raising standards for vendor products to rebuilding product features. ADP is committed to achieving a fully accessible user experience across our products.
What’s Next: The inclusive future of work
Giselle M.
We have continued to evolve the DEI Dashboard since it launched, and a long roadmap still lies ahead. One upcoming project is benchmarking—leveraging the unparalleled scale of ADP’s data and insights to help our clients understand how they stack up against other companies in their demographics.
My colleagues and I continue to ask questions, regularly creating new projects for ourselves. For example: Should remote and hybrid workers be paid differently apart from their in-office counterparts? How can we move beyond pay equity to true financial inclusion by giving employees the guidance they need to build wealth? We should have a lot to keep us busy!
With global and social changes happening during the last year and a half, I have seen our team move quickly and respond with solutions. ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background. My Future of Work teammates and I are living proofs. With this mindset and institutional support in place, I believe we lead the way to a more inclusive future of work.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science, creates impact with data automation and transformation
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
Dr. Raji, one of the pioneers bringing AI/ML to Pi-Payroll innovation products at ADP, shares her career journey and the different automated processes her team creates.
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science
Dr. Raji came from a lower-middle-class family in which both of her parents did not receive high school diplomas. “I saw their struggles, and as a girl growing up, I also faced different social pressures. Then I soon realized my love for math at school.” As she says: “That was when I made the connection in my mind, and I believed a STEM career could make a difference.”
From Bioinformatics to Automotive Industry
Before joining ADP, Dr. Raji has worked in various industries, including three years in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she worked on H1N1 Vaccine strain selection models. Her team took serology, sequence, protein structure, and phylogenetic data; they compared whether the current vaccine strain covered the virus’s dominant circulating strain. Dr. Raji took a break from Bioinformatics and later joined a Cox Automotive company called Manheim to help roll out OVE, a product providing car recommendations for online users. She also worked at a healthcare fraud prevention company called Cotiviti that focused on claim overpayment, fraud predictions, and prevention.
“When I first came to ADP, I was surprised to see the amount of data. We can produce so many innovative products from these. Every data scientist would love to work for ADP,” she says. “The second thing that surprised me was the freedom I got. The amount of support I got from the leadership teams was terrific. I got to be myself at work, knowing they welcomed innovative ideas.”
Dr. Raji and her family
Coming to ADP
When Dr. Raji joined ADP a few years ago, the company didn’t have many data scientists. She built a team of full-stack Automation Intelligence Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologists from scratch. “We call ourselves PiBrain, and we solve use cases across different business units through an advanced state of innovative AI/ML products and solutions,” she says. “I built three notable products through Digital Transformation, using AI/ML algorithms and APIs.”
“The first product involved automating digital implementation for some of our products, which eliminated manual processes and increased our net promoter scores, gave a better user experience, and increased client satisfaction,” she says. This process gave her team a more accurate data conversion process and saved costs for the clients. Dr. Raji introduced another automated compliance checkup product for pay statements, which eliminated the laborious process of scanning pay statements one by one and automating the process. The last project involved form digitization with a feedback loop that continuously learns from overrides.
Deep Learning
Dr. Raji’s team focuses on several key areas in their current work. The first product is Deep Learning, an authentication stack that identifies, extracts, and connects the documents. Another one is a Natural Language Processing stack that demonstrates transformation translation.
Her team helped build API services that take company handbooks as inputs. They used Natural Language Understanding models and elucidated answers for questions such as “What holidays are offered?” and “What is the holiday pay for full-time/temporary employees?” The responses were automatically sent back to implementation systems as callbacks to fill out the guided interview process.
Dr. Raji and her team at the Southern Data Science Conference
Giving Back to Community
Dr. Raji and her team attended last year’s GPT Connect and gave three presentations. The first presentation was open-source tools for AI/ML. Another one was Computer Vision and Deep Learning for naïve to advanced data extraction. “We also showed our Associates how to interpret Vendor Language and map those in ADP constructs,” she says.
“My team and I looked for outside opportunities to create an impact. We attended the Southern Data Science Conference in 2019, where we used data to predict human trafficking.” Her team successfully visualized and built models to predict trafficking. They identified “hubs,” where children were trafficked to and who trafficked them. An FBI director attended the presentation ceremony and found Intel helpful in targeting criminals. “The project gave me satisfaction because we worked for a cause. We wanted to make sure our knowledge continues to help others and give back to the communities,” Dr. Raji says.
One STEM Education at Innovation Academy
“People say it could be engineering, science, or math. But to me, STEM is a combination of all! It is an application of each field coming together to solve a business problem,” Dr. Raji says. She believes STEM is an applied field where interdisciplinary work is valued.
This is especially important in Dr. Raji’s involvement with Innovation Academy, a STEM school ADP sponsored in Alpharetta. “The goal is One Stem Education. I was one of the ambassadors who helped set up the syllabi and influenced the type of education students received,” she says. Dr. Raji’s love for children and STEM made this a perfect opportunity for her to have conversations about STEM opportunities. She is looking forward to planning and creating lab spaces for more talents who are interested.
Dr. Raji is also a painter. This is her work: Serene morning sunrise at St. Simon Island.
Best Advice
“We talked a lot about my background and where I came from. My life is a lesson itself. If you have a dream, don’t give up,” she says. Dr. Raji believes the secret of life is to fall seven times and get up on the eighth. For those pursuing data science, she recommends thinking outside the box and approaching problems from different perspectives. “Keep in mind being a data scientist means spending substantial time in data prep, data cleaning, deployment, and data quality checking. Patience is critical as each of the tasks is essential in building a complete model,” she says. “There will be challenges and disappointments, but don’t lose faith. Keep learning and chase your dreams.”
Dr. Raji is looking forward to inspiring more people and attracting more talents to ADP. To her, #ADPTech is innovative, supportive, and welcoming. Her team wants to mentor more women technologists and have more of them in leadership positions!
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
AnitaB.org Named ADP the Top Large Company for Women Technologists
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org, host of GHC, names ADP to be 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
The nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org has named ADP the 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category. The national program from AnitaB.org is the only benchmarking program that looks specifically at technical employees and awards companies that are embracing accountability and making the most progress toward the equity of women. Read the full press release here.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for providing opportunities for women in tech, driving better representation of women in the industry. We value diversity in the organization and are proud of supporting women in technology.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
We met up with four ADP women in tech attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration. They shared their inspiration and what it means to be a part of this incredible community. Read the full story here.
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Grace Hopper Celebration – Opportunities for Women in Tech to Connect #vGHC21
Women in STEM, Grace Hopper, Voice of Our People
We met up with four ADP women in tech attending this year’s Celebration. They shared their inspiration and what it means to be a part of this incredible community.
Grace Hopper Celebration – Opportunities for Women in Tech to Connect — #vGHC21
ADP is proud to sponsor our 12th consecutive year of AnitaB.org’s Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) held this year, September 27 – October 1. This year’s virtual Celebration theme is “Dare to Transform” and provides attendees with over 240+ sessions, Sponsor Hall, and 1:1 Meetings. All attendees will have great opportunities to network, inspire, and create long-lasting relationships with professionals. If you are attending, stop by our booth and say Hello!
We are even prouder to announce that AnitaB.org, host of GHC, named ADP 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category. The assessment considered key factors including representation by diversity, trends in hiring, advancement, and leadership. While facing a global pandemic, we continue to take multiple steps in supporting the technical talent pool. Read the full press release here.
The annual Grace Hopper Celebration – now in its 28th year – has been designed to connect women in technology to discuss career and research interests. We met up with four ADP women in tech who will be attending this year’s Celebration. They shared with us the inspiration and what it means to be a part of the incredible community.
Sree B.
Isabel E., Vice Present in Product Development, believes Grace Hopper is a beacon of hope for change. ”Being a woman in tech who usually is one of few women in the room, it gives me goosebumps to see the sea of women and diversity at Grace Hopper,” Isabel said. “It makes me feel optimistic for the future.”
Sree B., Senior Director in Application Development, tells us the Celebration is a wonderful opportunity to learn the journey of the highly talented and courageous women in technology, all dedicated to making a difference. “Hearing their stories; of success, failures, hopes, and achievements is truly inspiring and empowering,” Sree said.
“It offers a unique chance to
celebrate us – the women in tech.”
Tanuja G., Director in Application Development, attended the conference in person a few years ago and remembered the energizing experience. “Grace Hopper is a celebration of all things in tech! It’s a fabulous time and place to reflect on and celebrate everything women have achieved in the world of technology with the support of their allies in tech,” Tanuja looks forward to attending the virtual conference this year.
Tiffany D., Lead Data Scientist, shares with us Grace Hopper to her represents a chance to collaborate and learn from other females in technology. “I am very grateful for this amazing opportunity,” Tiffany said.
We also spoke to these women about their experiences as technologists here at ADP.
Isabel E.
Isabel describes ADP as a nurturing environment where associates are treated with dignity, respect, and supported professionally and personally. “I have had the opportunity to grow as a person and a professional with support from my leaders and my peers,” Isabel said. “I feel like I belong because I share a common empathy for clients and associates with my peers.”
“People matter first
and matter most.”
Sree sees ADP as one big family as she reflects on what Carlos, CEO of ADP, often says. She resonates with ADP’s core values, with a philosophy to care for its people and values. “I’m so glad to be part of ADP’s DataCloud team. I lead a cutting-edge technology team, where we focus on data monetization and provide solutions to our clients to bridge the pay equity gap, whether it’s gender-based or ethnicity-based,” Sree says, taking pride in working for ADP.
Tanuja G.
When it comes to mentorship, Tiffany and Tanuja share similar experiences. Tiffany values the support she has received from her management, organization, and fellow associates; they make her feel like she belongs at ADP.
“My managers, mentors, and team members all made me feel like I was already a part of the family,” Tanuja said.
“Over the years, and moving across different product teams, that feeling has followed me, and I have been lucky to impart that same sense of belonging to other team members whom I’ve had the pleasure to welcome into the fold.”
This year’s Celebration will be Sree’s third year attending GHC, and she feels rewarded as a nominated attendee. “I’m often the only female in most of the technical meetings, and I’m glad that GHC provides an avenue to hire more female techies and strengthen our presence around the room.” Sree looks forward to working with more female technologists.
In addition, Sree said, “ADP strongly encourages inclusive culture among the associates. With GPT sponsored mentorship programs, women are strongly encouraged to focus on their career growth and aim for leadership roles. I’m well respected across the teams I work with, not just because of the knowledge and skills I possess, but because of ADP’s culture to remove gender parity and provide an equal opportunity for everyone.” Sree also believes that ADP continues to support their associates in learning and future development.
Tiffany D.
When it comes to training and resources, Tiffany shares her career journey, “ADP empowered me to make a career transition from Finance to Technology.”
“ADP provided me with the tools to learn
and grow in this industry.”
“ADP has supported me throughout the stages of my career through mentorship, conferences, technical and leadership training, speaking opportunities, and support to pursue an advanced degree,” Isabel said.
“I am encouraged to use the knowledge I’ve gained and receive a chance to work on new and challenging projects, using cutting edge technology,” Tanuja said, and feels grateful to be attending the GHC for the second time.
In the future, ADP will continue providing opportunities and an environment for technologists to ask questions and learn from industry leaders. We encourage all women in tech to challenge, inspire, and celebrate what’s to come.
#WomenInTech #ADPLife
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Designing For All People: Inclusive UX at ADP
UX Design, Inclusive Design, Voice of Our People
Amber Abreu, Senior Manager of User Experience (UX) research at ADP, speaks with us about the essentials of inclusive design, educating with empathy, and the future of UX innovation at ADP.
Designing For All People: Inclusive UX at ADP
Amber Abreu, Senior Manager of User Experience (UX) research at ADP, has devoted her career to working in the field of inclusive and accessible UX design. She speaks with us about the essentials of inclusive design, educating with empathy, and the future of UX innovation at ADP.
What are you working on these days?
I just started a new role as Senior Manager of UX Research for the Growth team. ADP’s Global Product & Technology organization has three UX teams working under an “OneUX” umbrella: Our Generative team focuses on foundational understanding of our customers and internal associates, the Emerge team handles next-generation products, and the Growth team, my team, does boots-on-the-ground, day-to-day research for various product teams. OneUX is a huge effort with a focus on inclusive and accessible design. It’s a new initiative, and we’re all sort of holding hands as we move through this process together.
As a team leader, I’m excited to support people who are making a positive impact. The work we do on this team really does help people in their lives. I like having a sense of purpose that gets me out of bed every morning, and I want to share that feeling with the rest of my team.
You’ve had quite a career journey and came back to ADP. What brought you back? 
Someone I used to work with at ADP remembered me, told me they had an opening and asked if I was interested. I liked the people and thought it was a good fit. It was that simple. But I also saw it as a place where I could make a difference. In the 15 years since I’d previously worked at ADP, I’d worked on UX teams at companies like Delta and AT&T, where I’d been able to educate so many people about accessible design.
I think lots of organizations don’t fully understand what inclusive design actually means, even if they think they do. They might have UX teams, but sometimes they’re just checking a box—though I see this less and less as more people become aware of what smart user experience design can achieve. I was happy to come back to ADP because their commitment to inclusive UX matches my own.
Your passion for inclusive design is evident. How did you follow that career path?
In art school, we had only one semester on inclusive design, touching only a small facet in the much larger field of research and design. Inclusive UX is very technical, but the way you implement and deliver technical requirements can be so innovative. I’ve always been drawn to the intersection between problem-solving and really technical aspects of design. Think of some of the technologies we take for granted, like Alexa or Siri. Those ideas came out of inclusive UX design trying to help people with different capabilities and needs. Now everybody uses them, not just people with disabilities. Also, consider people who, for whatever reason, can’t use a mouse. What’s their user experience going to be?
My personal story is one of the reasons I’m passionate about inclusive design. I was paralyzed due to one of my pregnancies and lost the use of one side of my face. I couldn’t drink from a cup anymore. I couldn’t close my eye. I had to relearn how to do all sorts of things. My experience isn’t the same as someone who is permanently disabled or missing a limb or blind, but I think going through that and being willing to share the experience helps us talk about how UX can affect people and how it can help.
Probably the most significant technological innovation in modern history has been computerized technology and the internet. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier—but an entire segment of the population wasn’t considered and was left behind, which is antithetical to the whole purpose. If anything, computerized technology should create more equity instead of causing a great divide. I’ve been working my entire career to close the gap.
What’s your approach to inclusive design?
I try to educate and create empathy. At previous companies I’ve worked for, I’ve tried to bring people from the community to help inform designers of their particular experiences. I’ve also taken designers to an exhibition called Dialogue in the Dark that simulates total blindness. When you go in, you’re in utter darkness. You can’t see the hand in front of your face, and you confront the challenges blind people face every day. People who aren’t blind know it must be challenging, but being exposed to their daily experience helps us understand what that means.
It’s important to ask a lot of questions, seek knowledge, and share that knowledge. I tell this to people all the time: You’re not the first person to have this problem; someone has solved it. We just need to talk to each other.
How do you see your work shaping the future of ADP?
We’re still in the early days of evolving our UX teams. One area we are focusing on is the employee experience—if you’re an employee and you have to go out and check your payroll statement or your W-2, you’ll see changes there. We’re also updating our all-in-one platform for payroll and HR software targeted at mid-market clients. We’re working to make all of our visual design and interactive components accessible from a shared library. Once we get further, those changes will be visible across other products in our portfolio.
In the next six months to a year, I would like to put in place a solid foundation for an inclusive research program. It would include recruiting partnerships to bring people into research who have different disabilities and language capabilities and people from communities outside of ADP offices. Long term, I’d like to stand up a dedicated research program focused on informing future-thinking designs so we can operate on an international scale in countries with stricter accessibility requirements like Australia, UK, and Canada.
What excites you about what’s next?
There’s this misconception that the accessibility guidelines are only for people with disabilities, which is not true. They are for people whose first language is not in the system language. They’re for people who are older or less educated. There are different tiers of accessibility. And the core fundamental principles are that this work should lift up everyone.
There’s a lot here to be excited about, and because we’re all working together, we’re going to be stronger in the long run. Our team is growing, and we want people who care, who are willing to say, “I don’t know, but I’m willing to learn.” Every person who works on the project will say that they directly impacted someone with a disability in a positive way.
Interested in a career as a UX Designer or Researcher?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Women Engineer Magazine Top 50 Company.
Recognition, Awards, Women in STEM
ADP is thrilled to earn a place on this year’s 30th Annual “Top 50 Employers” in Woman Engineer Magazine for a second year in a row.
Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose top US companies they would most like to work for and/or whom they believe would provide a positive working environment for women engineers.
They chose ADP as one of the Top 50.
ADP is proud to build diverse teams that represent the diversity of our clients to drive innovation. At ADP, we focus on inclusion and reflect a diversity lens within our products.
Our focus on such programs as our partnership with Girls Who Code and our Women in Technology Leadership Mentoring Program has led to distinctions such as AnitaB.org naming ADP a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward women’s equity among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology.
Our Global Product and Technology (GPT) organization stays close to industry benchmarks and has adopted measures to continue to drive progress. ADP also supports philanthropic organizations that nurture the career development of girls and women in the technology field, helping them fulfill their potential as future tech leaders.
Our technology leaders are committed to driving diversity, including recruiting and developing women technologists while providing opportunities for them to grow their careers.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
We strive to offer personal development opportunities through self-driven platforms, and our International Women’s Network and our Empower Committee focused on Women in STEM. Regardless of your role, we offer opportunities for women technologists. Meet Some of the Women of ADP DevOps and how they drive data-centric development.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
Visit us at tech.adp.com and learn more about what we do.
ADP Women in STEM Profile: Laurie Liszewski
“As a leader, I’m outgoing and have strong opinions. But when it comes to the team, I want people to feel comfortable challenging me. I want to create an environment of empowerment with diversity of thought and perspectives.” – Laurie Liszewski, VP Product Development
If you tell Laurie Liszewski she can’t do something, she will do it, take pictures, and show you how well she did it. “It’s my mantra!”
Laurie grew up in New Jersey and isn’t afraid to try or learn anything. She’s been a real estate agent, an emergency medical technician working on an ambulance, and now is a vice president of product development at ADP.
“Find what drives you. We all work so hard. You have to love what you do and work for people where you feel comfortable being yourself,” she says.
Coming to ADP
Laurie says she fell into a job at ADP. Her husband worked for the company in the “Total Time” area as a customer service rep. Laurie’s family had grown to three children and it was time to pursue a new work opportunity. So, she applied to work as an administrative assistant at ADP and says, “It was a great way to learn the business and get experience from the ground up.”
She started as an assistant to the business systems analyst team that managed ADP’s Autopay solution. “I was in awe of the people I worked for,” Laurie says. “They had such deep knowledge of both tech and business. I asked how they got there; it turns out no one there went to school to be a business systems analyst. It evolved from a core skill set.”
Above: Laurie Liszewski
For people who don’t know what business systems analysts do, Laurie explained, “they bridge the business need with the technology and design. You have to understand and speak both tech and business. Today, the title isn’t as prevalent as it was in the 1990s. The position has evolved more into product management, although we have a few core areas like compliance where the role is vital.”
It wasn’t long before the vice president in that area noticed and was impressed with Laurie’s work. She told Laurie she was very analytical and had a unique perspective, then asked her to consider a three-year training program to become a business systems analyst. Laurie jumped at the opportunity and says, “That’s where my true tech career started.” Laurie’s vice president was Bernie Sussina, her first mentor and sponsor. “I always aspired to be as well respected and valued as Bernie. She was truly an icon to me, an inspirational woman in leadership in a predominately male world of tech. To this day, I am forever grateful to Bernie for the opportunity.”
Laurie completed the program and moved into an associate systems analyst role, then worked her way up to senior systems analyst.
When ADP began working on the new platform for small business services (SBS), many people on her team moved over to the new product. Laurie ended up following them and took a role working on the design of a client-facing user interface.
“I learned so much because I was at the front end working with clients,” she says. “You can see how they actually used the system. I was able to attend trade shows and client user groups. I also had the opportunity to do ride-alongs with the sales team. It opened a whole new world for me and so much clicked. I realized that what they were doing was much more than just a series of tasks. I learned and understood what they needed to accomplish to run their business.”
Becoming a manager
When Laurie started thinking about the next steps in her career, she began to pay attention to how people were chosen for different roles. “ADP is great at seeing people’s potential rather than just their experience,” she says.
“I had great leaders who inspired me to become a leader. But it’s a big shift. You move from controlling your own destiny to your success depending entirely on the success of your team.”
She applied for her first leadership role and was pretty sure she wouldn’t get it because she didn’t have management experience.
“I scheduled a one-on-one with Rich Wilson, the senior vice president of SBS product development, and asked why I wouldn’t be qualified for the job. If I wasn’t qualified, I wanted to know what I needed to do. He had no idea who I was and was a little taken aback. I wondered if I had made a mistake. But he was impressed, and I got the position. I chuckle to this day because he loved to tell that story. Rich was my second huge supporter, mentor and sponsor.
“Don’t get me wrong, he was tough. I attribute much of my success to his rigor. As I reflect on my career, Rich pushed me to stretch and grow in ways I never had before. He always put me in roles I wasn’t sure I was ready for. It was the best preparation for my future because I kept learning the tools and skills I needed for the next step on the journey. I am forever grateful to Rich for believing in me.
“I was also very inspired by Regina Lee, division president for SBS, who explained it is a leader’s responsibility to help people grow in their ADP careers. Our obligation is to not only hold people to their current goals but also to empower our teams to hold us to the career goals they set for themselves.”
Next, an opportunity opened on the ADP retirement services team. Laurie talked to the new senior vice president about it, and he encouraged her to apply.
“I had my payroll wings, but only had a small idea of what the retirement business was based on my own personal experience with 401(k) plans,” she says. “That role gave me the opportunity to learn that part of the business and a new product. While I was there, one of my key responsibilities was to help the organization move from a waterfall development life cycle to the more modern agile methodology since we had done the transition on the backend of the RUN Powered by ADP® payroll solution a few years before.”
The above photo was taken in October 2019, at the GPT conference in Miama, FL. ADP associates shown, left to right, are: Karen Stavert, Erin Moss, Manish Bhatnagar, Laurie, Mike Ruangutai* and Ranjan Aggarwal. (*No longer at ADP.)
About the same time, ADP moved as an organization from business systems analysts to product managers.
“I had a choice to be the Senior Product Manager for ADP’s retirement services division or go back to the RUN team,” Laurie says. “I scheduled a meeting with Don Weinstein, ADP’s chief product and technology officer, and asked where ADP needed me most and where I could make the greatest impact. After talking with him about it, I decided to go back to the RUN team as a senior product owner.”
Eventually, Laurie moved from product management back to product development, where she focused more on compliance and statutory requirements and worked as a liaison with the legal team. Additionally, she led portfolio management for the Autopay solution and loved her team and work there.
For Laurie, it was like going home. At the same time, she could see how far she had come.
“I went from ordering pencils to leading the team I was in awe of when I started this journey,” she says. “I wondered how I would ever measure up and whether I would be strong enough to lead these amazing people. Earning their respect was the best thing I’ve done. I also love compliance work, and this gave me the opportunity to lead that for the major and national account services payroll engine.”
She landed in her current role as vice president of product development when the senior vice president of ADP’s small business services division took a role in compliance services. Laurie loved working with him because of his transparency and honesty. It was also an opportunity to learn something new, particularly employer tax compliance, reporting, filing and payments.
“Tax is a whole other level of complexity,” Laurie says. “In every group I’ve had the honor to work in across ADP, each team thinks their systems are the most complex. And it’s true! It’s all complex.”
The above was taken at a Girls, Inc. event in June 2019. Shown left is Alyssa Liszewski (ADP La Palma, CA office) with Laurie.
Laurie loves the challenge and responsibility.
“Here I am. Never, ever would I have thought that I would be leading a division responsible for managing all the tax liabilities for the clients we service,” she says. “It’s enough to keep you up at night, thinking about the impact you have on people and the economy. The value ADP brings to the economy and each individual we pay and employer we service has never been more amplified than these past 13 months with the pandemic. The number of stimulus plans and tax law changes all of the compliance teams had to react to are like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my career.
“As a leader, I’m outgoing and have strong opinions. But when it comes to the team, I want people to feel comfortable challenging me. I want to create an environment of empowerment with diversity of thought and perspectives. We need people who understand our clients and know what it’s like for employees as well as businesses – out of the box thinkers who evolve with the market.”
Ready for more?
Explore the stories of these and other ADP Women in STEM, and learn about careers at ADP.
The above was taken at a team building event in October 2019. ADP associates pictured left to right are: Victor Mak, Erik Kachmarsky, Mike Plonski*, Laurie, Margo Dear, Ajit Kumar, Jordi Conrado, Maya McGuinness, Mat Saunders*, Mike Ruangutai* and Arjun Hegde. (*No longer at ADP.)
Tech & Innovation Blog
Meet (some of) the Women of ADP DevOps
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, DevOps
One group of women within our DevOps team share their story of camaraderie and making a difference at ADP. Every day, they work in close support of one another to tackle exciting technical challenges and to drive data-centric development across the company.
ADP is a 2020 Grace Hopper Award recipient for our commitment to diverse teams and the overall development of women, no matter where they are in their careers. One group of women within our DevOps team share their story of camaraderie and making a difference at ADP. Every day, they work in close support of one another to tackle exciting technical challenges and to drive data-centric development across the company. We recently caught up with Monica Bansal (Application Developer), Natalia Ermolayeva (Senior Application Developer), Tao Hu (Principal Application Developer), and Stella Jia (Senior Director, Application Development). It was clear from our chat and how they complement each other’s work why they’ve become such a tight-knit group. Below, they share what makes their collaboration work so well, their recent wins, and what they’re excited to learn—and build—in the months and years to come.
What do each of you do at ADP, and why did you join the team?
Monica: My job is a blend of application development and data analytics—I assist ADP’s data scientists with experiments and then build out the APIs. I’ve been with the company full-time for about a year now; I started as a summer intern while getting my master’s in data science and computer science. I knew I wanted to continue my career in this field, and I liked getting to work with real data and implement it in the real world. I did another part-time internship last spring while finishing my degree, and then I joined Stella’s team.
Tao: I’m a principal application developer, which means I build many of the libraries and components that allow our work to scale—they become the blueprint other teams implemented. I’ve been with ADP since 2013. Before that, I worked in finance as a Java developer. A friend of mine recommended ADP after my company moved farther from my home. I have two young boys, and I wanted to make sure I had time to take care of them. I knew ADP had a reputation for being a family-friendly employer.
When I started at ADP, my work focused on producing reports. But once Stella joined, our team shifted to more machine learning. I love problem-solving and simplifying processes, so it’s been really fun for me.
Natalia: I’m a senior application developer, and I see my role as keeping data safe and available—I handle testing and operations. I’m very new to ADP; I joined about four months ago. One big attraction was the level of collaboration between departments. I was very impressed with the people who interviewed me. Everyone was very professional, and they mentioned many modern tools that I was excited to use. I knew ADP would be a good place to broaden my skills across a lot of different areas.
Stella: I’m a senior director for application development. My job is to lead the Application Development team and make sure we’re delivering insights that will help ADP build better products. As Tao mentioned, that involves a lot of machine learning work and other statistical analysis, as well as data mining and visualization techniques. An intrinsic strength of this team is connecting the data to the real people we serve. When we look for patterns and anomalies, we’re trying to figure out how we can make people’s jobs easier as we ADP innovate and grow.
I joined ADP about four years ago; a mentor and friend I’d previously worked for recommended I apply. He had great things to say about the leadership and the vision for transformation from a service company to a technology company. The people were great, too, and I liked that I’d get to learn about a lot of domains I hadn’t worked in before. I think it’s an excellent environment for anyone who wants to grow by adding value and helping others.
How do you support each other’s work?
Tao: We’re helping each other every day, sharing results and ideas for new approaches. For example, we’ve been using a new data analysis tool to build some reports, and now we’re looking at other projects that might benefit from those same functionalities. Because of our roles, Monica and I work especially closely, but I feel like I can pick up the phone or message anyone on the team when I have something to figure out, and I’ll get help right away.
Natalia: Yes—I like that my teammates are always just a call or text away. Knowing each other as people, chatting and joking around makes it so much easier to communicate and work together. We’re comfortable sharing ideas freely and collaborating, even when we’re not in the same room.
Stella: Definitely. We’d love to hang out in person more, but even with everyone virtual, it’s turned out really well. And that collaboration is so important. I think of the team as a set of pillars—if any of them aren’t there, none of it works. Monica is doing the analytics and research, slicing and dicing the data. Once we’ve found something we want to build upon, Tao steps in to create that foundation. And then Natalia is there to make sure we’re not only maintaining privacy but keeping things sustainable from an operations perspective. We all need each other, and we’re all working toward the same goal and figuring out how to measure success, which could be a product’s stickiness, preventing errors, or saving people time.
Monica: I think everyone on the team is naturally very passionate about working toward what we all want to achieve. You can always go to someone with a question, and everyone pitches in when someone needs help to make sure we’re hitting our targets. Stella is great about making sure we’re all happy and doing the kind of work we want to be doing.
Tell us about some of the ways you’ve made an impact at ADP.
Tao: We recently started using a new workflow manager tool, which has been a big win. Before, if we had a lot of ETL (extract, transform, load) jobs, we’d get files from other teams and load them into the database. With all the pieces and feeds, it wasn’t easy to see the status of any particular piece. That was frustrating. Stella recommended a workflow tool, which I hadn’t heard of at the time. After I got up to speed, we started building things out, adapting the data monitor and using the workflow manager to grab all the outputs, sending them to the monitor, and building the dashboards there. Now we have an accessible overview to see what’s working and what isn’t. It’s been so helpful.
Natalia: Due to the nature of my work, success isn’t always obvious. If things run smoothly, no one notices what happens in the background, which means I’ve done my job. As I get more familiar with how things work at ADP, I’ll have some opportunities to automate more daily, repetitive tasks. That’s a big priority.
Monica: We did an error-detection project recently where we built a model to help us flag problems on the back-end when a client runs their payroll and how users respond when they get those warnings. If we have a proper pipeline of data to run the model regularly, clients can see predictions for the entire week, and we can see whether they’re using or ignoring the information, which tells us whether we need to make some corrections.
More broadly, our team helps others understand the importance and potential of data, especially here at ADP, where we have such rich data. We want to drive data-centric development, which starts with data collection. Before we can do the analytics, our data needs to be clean. So we work with a lot of other teams, helping them understand how to use the tools and making sure they’re comfortable and up-to-date on everything they need.
Stella: We are part of a data-informed culture. Technology evolves quickly. At ADP, we want to stay ahead and be proactive rather than reactive. Data is a huge asset in that effort. It gives us much faster feedback loops and insights into our clients. We can quickly see when and whether a client’s hitting a milestone.
But to leverage that asset, as Monica mentioned, we need a certain level of data literacy throughout the business. If developers understand how data can help them build a better product, it will be much easier to scale. Part of our team’s job is to encourage data literacy. We also help establish standards, offer training, and get development teams running on an autonomous path to adopt a canonical format every team can follow. We find that it is contagious. Once a few teams embrace the data, other teams understand the benefits more quickly and have more colleagues to help them learn.
What are you excited to learn next?
Natalia: There are a lot of tools I’m excited to learn more about, including the ones my colleagues have mentioned. I’m looking forward to using new technologies in general, particularly machine learning tools. I think I’ll have many opportunities to code for our team’s internal purposes, for affirmation and monitoring, too. Because I’m new to the team, I’m also learning the big picture and how everything’s connected. ADP is great with documentation, so I can find almost everything I need on my own. But I can always ask my colleagues or get up to speed through a learning session with one of our senior team members.
Tao: I’m excited to keep learning new technologies, too. I’ll often jump over to educational resources to get a quick sense of something, then I come back and try to use it. The machine learning side of things is especially exciting. Besides learning new languages, I love new concepts for how to approach our work.
Monica: I feel like I’ve grown so much already! From the start of my first internship to now, I’ve been able to work on many different services and projects, from machine learning models to APIs to analytics. Whenever Stella says, “I have an idea,” we get excited. The technologies are always changing, and that helps us grow.
Stella: One thing I’m thinking about is how to give developers more visibility into what we do. As Natalia mentioned, most of our foundational work tends to happen behind the scenes. We look forward to building stronger connections with our frontend partners, which will provide even more opportunities to enjoy the results and get recognition for our work.
At ADP, our talent pipeline is so important. It’s about getting the right people and building a strong culture. We want the goal, in everything my team does, to be a better developer experience. We strive to make people happy, make their jobs easier, make their days more efficient. If we provide them with a platform that allows them to test and measure their ideas more quickly, they’ll have more time to explore new ideas and innovate.
Tech & Innovation Blog
“Building a World of Truly Inclusive Technology,” AnitaB.org Names ADP a Top Company for Women Technologists.
Women in STEM, Recognition, Grace Hopper
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward the equity of women among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology. Hear from Krupali who describes her recruiting experience with ADP at Grace Hopper.
At this year’s virtual Grace Hopper Celebration hosted by the nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org, they announced ADP earned the distinction as a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category. Read the full press release here.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward the equity of women among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology.
Our Global Product and Technology (GPT) organization stays close to industry benchmarks and has adopted measures to continue to drive progress. ADP also supports philanthropic organizations that nurture the career development of girls and women in the technology field, helping them to fulfill their potential as future tech leaders.
Our technology leaders are committed to driving diversity, including recruiting and developing women technologists while providing opportunities for them to grow their careers.
Since we are celebrating Grace Hopper, let’s check out a post about one of our attendees and hear from Krupali as she describes her recruiting experience with ADP & Grace Hopper.
#WomenInTech #ADPLife
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