We exist to advance
women in tech
Toast is Canada's leading tech recruitment firm and community for women in tech. We place exceptional talent, build community at scale, and create the products and programs that move the needle on gender equity in the industry.
Toast was born out of a genuine need to diversify technical teams.
We observed that talented women were leaving tech and facing barriers to entry, and current hiring systems weren't doing anything to stop it. If we want women to change the system, they have to be in the system - building it, shaping it, and making decisions about what comes next.
To connect, champion, and advance women in tech through intentional hiring, community, and products that close opportunity gaps and open doors.
Three things that set us apart
1
We started as a white-glove hiring platform. Our recruitment services addressed the pipeline barriers through sourcing, matching, and connecting talented women with companies that may not have found them otherwise.
In the process, we curated a diverse talent pool of thousands of skilled women, creating more pathways for women to enter and advance in tech while helping companies diversify their teams.
2
Our community was created to address the lonely-only phenomenon, foster a sense of belonging, and increase retention in tech. It equips women with the resources, upskilling, coaching, network, and the support that keeps them thriving in the industry. We built initiatives like the Toast Summit, Supper & Spa Clubs, and The Champions Program to create opportunities for women to propel their careers forward alongside women who understand them.
We also launched the Toast Institute to facilitate research on gender equity and inform better practices and systems across the industry.
3
As we grew, we built the Toast Portal to power both our membership and recruitment. It gives candidates a place to track applications and receive feedback. We added Rollie, our AI-powered career agent, for on-demand support with resumes, interviews, salary negotiation, and more.
Clients asked for more direct access to our talent pool so they could hire talented women at scale. So we built our first SaaS product: the Toast Talent Marketplace, enabling us to scale our impact and accelerate the hiring of women in tech.
Everything we do feeds back into the Toast ecosystem. Our community, research, hiring services, and technology are designed to continuously create better outcomes for women, organizations, and society as a whole. When women have better access to opportunity, organizations gain access to stronger, more diverse talent. These diverse teams build better, more innovative products - ones that are better equipped to understand and serve the people they build for. By improving the experience for women at every stage of their careers, we're not just changing who gets hired; we're helping build a more equitable, innovative, and prosperous future for everyone.
The numbers tell the story
Toast is driving real, measurable results for women in tech across Canada. This is what happened in 2025.
47%
of Toast members received a raise in 2025, and 58% of those raises were 10% or more.
1 in 5
Toast members stepped into a leadership or management role in 2025.
85%
of candidates we place negotiate their offer, nearly 1.7x the industry norm.
1 in 12
Toast members transitioned into tech from another industry in 2025, breaking through in a challenging market.
Meet our founder
April Hicke
April leads Toast, a recruitment and HR platform dedicated to increasing gender diversity in tech. She brings over 15 years of experience in leadership, change management, and strategic team development, and co-founded one of Canada's fastest-growing women-led tech companies.
A Certified Change Practitioner, TEDx speaker, and Top 40 Under 40 honouree, she served as Chief Growth Officer before becoming CEO, helping scale Toast at a 400% CAGR. Her work has been featured in The Globe and Mail, BNN Bloomberg, and Forbes, and she speaks regularly on talent, business growth, and gender equity at Canada's largest tech conferences.
Known for her exclamation-mark personality, April is a serial relationship-builder and savvy problem-solver who devotes much of her time to coaching emerging leaders.
