Queens Tech Corner: WorkOnward

This is Queensborough – February 2026 Content

It’s Queens Tech Corner time! This month’s featured tech entrepreneur is Holly Jooyoung Diamond, Founder and CEO of WorkOnward,  an inclusive hiring platform that connects local workers with Main Street businesses using AI for good. To learn more, visit the company’s website at https://www.workonward.com/.

Can you tell us a little about your company and how you got your start?

I’m a first-generation immigrant and a self-taught entrepreneur. In 2008, I moved to New York with just $400, no job, no place to stay, and no friends or family to lean on. Like so many immigrant entrepreneurs I’ve since met in Queens, I came here with nothing but the belief that hard work would eventually lead to opportunity.

Years later, during the pandemic, my family and I opened a small Korean restaurant called Mista Oh. By then, I had over a decade of experience in recruiting and believed staffing would be the one challenge I could manage. I was wrong.

For two years, we tried every staffing service and hiring platform available and still struggled to find reliable local workers. The systems were expensive, impersonal, and clearly not built for small businesses or hourly workers. That frustration brought me back to what I had felt when I first arrived in New York: how hard it is to find work when you lack access, networks, or the right tools.

That experience led me to build WorkOnward, a map-based hiring platform that helps small businesses and job seekers find each other close to home. I bootstrapped the company from the ground up because I had lived the problem myself. My experience as an immigrant, a recruiter, and a small business owner shapes everything we build. At its core, WorkOnward is about dignity, access, and helping people find good work without unnecessary barriers.

How did you get your start in tech?

I did not come from a traditional tech background. I came from recruiting, operations, and cross-cultural psychology, working directly with people navigating work, immigration, and economic survival. My entry into tech wasn’t about learning to code first, it was about learning how systems fail real people.

I learned tech by building alongside engineers, designers, and product teams, asking questions, challenging assumptions, and staying close to the users. I spent countless hours translating lived problems from small business owners and hourly workers into product requirements, testing features in the real world, and iterating based on what actually worked.

Do you do any work to support your local community?

Through WorkOnward, we actively support our local community by offering free resume support, local job-matching events, and partnerships with nonprofits and small businesses across Queens and New York City. Our work is very hands-on. We focus on helping people get hired, not just get advice.

Everything we do is centered on practical outcomes. That means connecting real people to real jobs, supporting small businesses that are trying to hire locally, and removing barriers for individuals who are often excluded from traditional hiring systems. Our goal is simple: make access to work more fair, more local, and more human.