By now, we all know that there are many normative hiring practices that lead to non-diverse leadership and even perpetuate harmful impacts on our communities, such as the wage gap between womxn of color and white males. For example, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shares that hiring practices such as requiring applicants to pass a physical agility test or lift a certain amount of weight may have an especially negative effect on older applicants, requiring that employees live within a certain geographic region may have a negative effect on applicants of a certain race, and broadly excluding applicants with criminal records may have a negative effect on applicants based on race or national origin. Nonprofit workers we’ve talked to have also described experiencing hiring practices that completely ignore the humanity of the applicant, such as being asked to do a performance demonstration also known as an interview assignment, often busywork, that take hours to prepare for and complete without pay as part of the interview process, or completing two rounds of interviews only to never hear back on next steps or decisions. What was clear for us at LLC was the traditional hiring practices we all often default to were not very aligned with our values or mission. How can hiring be more mutual? How can we be more mindful of implicit bias? How can we invite a more diverse set of candidates to the table? As a team, we have been unlearning and learning new, liberatory ways forward.

Establishing new liberatory approaches involves a certain degree of risk. You have to put aside the “proven” way of doing things and try on new or revive older ways of doing things. Whether you are inventing or recycling, your approach will be different from the current white-dominant norm. Consequently, the track record for these efforts either may not exist or may have been obscured or erased. Knowing this, LLC adopted a learning stance in our approach to staff recruitment. 

We applied the best of our knowledge about liberatory leadership, ethical and equitable HR, and other models which allow us to do just work in just ways to develop our recruitment strategy.  We also invited applicants to share their thoughts about what would make our recruitment processes more liberatory.  We had no idea what kind of responses we would get or if people would appreciate and understand our intentions in asking the question.  We’re happy to report that in every single case, without exception, the feedback we received was in line with the spirit of the question: generous, thoughtful, and generative. If you contributed to this body of knowledge, thank you.

In this series we will share how we conducted our most recent hiring process, how we applied a liberatory lens, what went well, some things we got wrong, and what we learned from the full experience. 

Our hiring process is broken down into four parts: Application Process, Interview & Screening Process, Decision-Making & Offers, and Onboarding. The writing below covers the Application and Interview processes.