“Let technology improve the lives of the disabled”

From entrepreneur to CEO, Nish Parikh has always bounced back from failures and rejections by not giving up or making excuses. In the early days of Rangam, he ventured into e-commerce, took risks, and suffered financial losses in a general construction contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He also faced a huge setback when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

Nish has a Bachelor's degree in Instrumentation and Control Engineering and has always wanted to use technology to make life easier. As a leader, he analyzes his strengths and weaknesses to understand the criticism and process it in a positive way. He is comfortable in his own skin and never lets his ego get in the way. He changed his plans to include something he was interested in for the first time: helping people with autism by using touchscreen technology. Nish recognized that many disabled people hit a cliff after age 18 and have little support as adults. One of the areas they clearly lack is employment.

Nish made his own autism management program, which was recognized around the world at the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He won the half-million-dollar Verizon Powerful Answers Award for his idea to help people with autism and collect data by working with Dr. Michael Lewis, Eden Autism Services, and ECLC of New Jersey.

Nish co-founded Rangam with his wife, Hetal Parikh, to connect people to jobs and improve the way mental health is managed in schools, homes, and workplaces. Rangam Technologies (formerly Web Team Corporation) will develop game-based education programs for preschoolers and teenagers in New Jersey. A mobile app development centre in India was established prior to the 2008 recession, which triggered a crumbling U.S. economy.

As a Disability-Owned Business Enterprise (DOBE®), Rangam has built a culture of empathy, inclusion, and employee engagement by providing disability-related resources through webinars, discussions, blogs, and workshops. Nish enrolled himself in the HBS-OPM program in 2015 and found it inspiring, especially the "blue ocean’ strategy.

In 2016, Johnson & Johnson reached out to Rangam seeking candidates. The requirement was shared with Eden Autism Services, and two individuals were hired. Later that year, Comcast found out about our expertise in neurodiversity and interviewed us on National Public Radio (NPR). Comcast engaged us to manage the process of candidate hiring and onboarding. Out of four candidates, they hired two, one of whom, Matt Brennan, went on to win the ASA All-Star Award in 2019.

In 2017, Nish developed the SourceAbled program. Rangam is helping companies hire a lot of autistic, neurodiverse, and disabled people through its SourceAbled program. It is also helping companies keep good employees by creating a natural support system and a culture of inclusion and empathy.

In 2018, they started partnering with Accenture to help them support their client, Bristol-Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical company. He joined the NJ chapter of TiE, a global organization whose goal is to encourage entrepreneurship through education, mentoring, networking, funding, and incubation.

Since 2014, JPMorgan Chase has been growing their ‘Autism at Work’ program; the team developed programs in seven states across four countries and hired 126 people with autism. In 2019, they partnered with us. In collaboration with NEXT for Autism, we also provided autism-focused training to over 1,000 employees in Chicago. Now, Rangam is a partner of the Stanford Neurodiversity Project.

61 million adults in the US are disabled and experience an unemployment rate of twice that of the non-disabled. While companies struggle to attract and retain skilled candidates, this population with unique skills is completely untapped. Rangam has recently launched TalentArbor, which automatically takes a job requisition and calculates a score. TalentArbor uses Rangam's 25 years of experience to build AI tools like the Job Alignment Indicator, which figures out how well a role fits with a candidate's skills, and the Location Availability Indicator, which figures out if the location makes it easy to hire these candidates.

"I would like to give back what I have learned to the entrepreneurs-to-be. I would love to share insights and strategies on how to expand diverse hiring efforts. "Together, we will drive innovation in the entrepreneurial world through empathy and collaboration," says Nish.

Since the pandemic began, SourceAbled represented 15% of Rangam’s overall hires in the same period, which well exceeds the 7% ‘disability utilization’ goal laid out by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Our work in DE&I encompasses other diversity categories, including ethnically diverse populations, military veterans, economically disadvantaged groups, LGBTQA+, and BIPOC, among others, says Nish.

Nish’s resilience has rubbed off on everyone at Rangam in that no team member ever gives up on the company’s mission to "Accelerate Meaningful Employment for Everyone."