Combating Inequities in Hiring Practices

Webinar with Tahir Duckett & Lena Tom on Aug. 6, 2020

Full Transcript

Lena: So really excited to get started. So today just to set the agenda really briefly, we’re going to go through some introductions and learning goals. You’ll get to hear more from Tahir and I.

We are going to establish some of our framework for this conversation. We’re taking a really important racial justice lens for hiring for this conversation. Tahir is going to get us really into the weeds on hiring and legal standards cause really this is about understanding the status quo of where we’ve been and where we’re trying to go. So, I just want to again say thank you, and we have a really wide variety of folks that are joining this call today. And I just want to reiterate that, while this webinar is geared towards folks from the non-profit and social good space, we know that there were some folks who signed up from the corporate spaces and government spaces. So welcome, welcome, there’s plenty to learn and plenty that applies to all sectors, but I do want to be clear that a lot of the examples and things we’ll be talking about, are really coming from our experiences in the nonprofit progressive space and rooted in those values and those causes.

Like I said, this is going to be a pretty meaty webinar. We’re going to go through a lot. Because I think it’s really almost part of a larger curriculum. So you didn’t know it, but you kind of had a prerequisite to this training, which is hopefully learning and leaning into many of the conversations that have been happening again recently around equity and racism in this country. This is sort of your 201 level course. We expect that you’re coming in with some existing knowledge of tough concepts like white supremacy. In other words, you’ve probably recently said "Black Lives Matter" and hopefully you’ve been doing the work to understand what that really means. If for some reason, you, as an individual, are just not quite not there yet, this webinar might not be right for you right now. But we’re ready to get into these really meaty things.

Really quickly about us, I am Lena and I am the Founder of Meso Solutions. I’ve been in the progressive and non-profit social good space for over a decade now somehow. And a lot of that time, I was working in data and analytics and it was a rising field and through that I saw a lot of problems with how we were functioning as campaigns and organizations, as well as specifically in hiring. And over the years I really had an opportunity to do a lot of it and learn from some really great leaders and also to see some things that didn’t work so well. So I, like I said, founded Meso Solutions as a way to address that. I’m really excited. This is our first big webinar and we just officially founded last year.

I’m also the co-founder of Progressive Data Jobs, a website where we help to elevate jobs and opportunities in the progressive space that were previously difficult to find.

And I’m joined by Tahir Anderson Duckett, and Tahir will give a more thorough introduction of himself in a bit but he is an associate at Relman law. He is also the founding Executive Director of Rethink. ReThink is a nonprofit that is focused on the prevention of sexual assault by working with young men and boys to break down the cultural norms that underpin sexual violence. And last but certainly not least, he is a founding Executive Committee Member for the Law For Black Lives DC group. I’ll let him introduce himself a bit more in just a bit here but we want to talk about our learning goals and key expectations for this hour here.

Again this is sort of your 201 level course. You’ve been hearing about the importance of these things like power and privilege and racism and discrimination, so what dos this mean for hiring? We want to be able to recognize the power structures and inherent privilege in hiring. And understand these things are not just something relegated to people in other spaces or other issues. We want to focus and understand models to combat hiring discrimination. [We'll] Learn some of the legal and historical background that has led to our current hiring practices.

And again come away hopefully with a framework to start moving your hiring into a better direction. So with that, a racial justice lens for hiring.

Why are we doing this? Why are we taking a racial justice lens when we’re talking about equity? We’re choosing to use a racial justice lens for this webinar, because it is part of the broader conversations that are happening about racism, particularly toward Black, Brown and Indigenous people in our spaces. Again recognizing that racism doesn’t just result in things like police brutality. It actually plays a role in our everyday lives, including our workplaces. But does that mean that sexism, ableism, or classism are less pernicious? Absolutely not. We know those are absolutely part of the challenge too, but we want to make sure we’ve been called to do lately which is to center race and to center Black voices in particular because of it’s quite literal visibility and how it comes into play in hiring. So just to bring that to bear. Our colleagues over at Inclusv, which is an organization that focuses on getting more People of Color into the Progressive Workspace did a recent report “In Defense of Black Staff in the Political Sector” and they surveyed hundreds of leaders and workers in our space. And one of the quotes that really stood out was this:

“Progressive organizations are predominantly led by white people trying to tell people of color how they should take action. That is a problem." And we agree and we believe that without having a really honest conversation about how this is playing out in our space, we can’t possibly fix it. We have to start with acknowledging that this is the challenge. This of course, like many of the other conversations about racism in spaces, is not about saying this is one group that is wrong about everything and this other group that’s right about everything. This is about identifying and acknowledging the challenge and that if we want to fix our systems we need to rebuild them in a way that protects those that are most vulnerable because it’ll ultimately build a system that is better for everyone. So, by opening ourselves to a racial justice framework, we can challenge the status quo that we hold in ourselves and our organizations.

You may have seen this slide floating around the internet the last few weeks.

The Four Dimensions of Racism was originally put out by Slow Factory Foundation and this is really just such a vital framework that we are going to talk about. A lot of times when we talk about, and a lot of the recent conversations especially again talking about racism in our spaces we really tend to focus on the interpersonal and internalized. And when it comes to hiring it's really, really easy to focus on those things because, well, we're trying to find one individual.

We're trying to find one good person. And we do want to allow people to be able to come to work as their whole selves and be able to be good and to be contributors and all of that good stuff. But if we only focus on the interpersonal and internalized aspects of racism in our workspaces, we're never going to really, truly root out the problems.

So, we are really going to focus on these institutional and structural issues - the policies and practices that reinforce racist standards within a workplace or organization and the multiple institutions that do that. For those of us again, on here that are from the progressive space we are all so closely and tightly intertwined, that we have to do this together. We can't just have one organization somehow fix it and not see that happen across the board. The root of the problem is that we think of equity and inclusion as something that is only occurring at the interpersonal level through implicit bias and things like that, we're just not going to see a fairer hiring process. And the other thing, too, that I want to take a moment before we get into legal fun stuff, is really just acknowledging that the reason I like this framework in particular is that equity, including equity in hiring, is really about power and privilege. And everyone on here, whether you are in a hiring position, or even if you are just a staff person, you have power and privilege. I have power and privilege. We know that it all plays out, because we are in a situation where we are able to have an impact on someone's life or multiple people's lives in a very direct way. And we have to recognize that this is just baked in and to start to correct it we have to be aware and comfortable with that.

So, that was already a lot. I want to shift into the conversation with Tahir. And get into a little bit of the history of where we've been with legal things and all these conversations and how we kind of got to the point we're at.

Tahir, first, I would love if you could just introduce yourself a little bit further.

Tahir: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and for putting this together. It's so important that we have these conversations, not just in ways that are just limited to liability or trying to deal with any individual situation that happens but in ways that are really proactive.

And that's part of why I decided to go to law school in the first place. I worked in the labor movement for nearly a decade and, as I was working there it was really clear that there were all these rules that seemed really opaque. Really challenging to figure out what really mattered. And for me, it's really important to have -- it became really important to have an understanding of what those rules were, so that I could help co-conspirators get around them, where the rules are unjust or not necessarily reflective of the world in which we want to build.

And try to really shape and reshape those rules so that they can better reflect the world that we want to build.

Lena: Great, thank you. Tahir, I'd love if you could just level set for us, and get us started. A lot of time a lot of the things we see in hiring is the use of things like Equal Opportunity Employment Statements, which usually says something about, "We won't discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age." But I'd love to have you explain what an Equal Opportunity Employment, an EOE, Statement really is, and what if any purpose it's serving.

Tahir: Yeah, so these are really interesting. I actually had to go and do a little bit of research to find out what the origin of these statements were. And what I found is that, they actually come out of federal regulations, which require that federal contractors and subcontractors, in their solicitations and advertisements, and it's actually a quote. They have to say "All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion,sex, orientation, gender identity, or national origin." Beyond that, it's words. It's cover, I think in some situations. But it's just words. It doesn't on it's own signal to anybody. First of all they're so ubiquitous and they are words that have been uttered by a whole lot of places that have then gone on to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, etc

And so, on their own, they don't have very much power, beyond just sort of complying with federal regulations if you happen to be a federal contractor or subcontractor.

Now, that being said, I think that I have seen ways in which people have tried to use these statements to signal a little bit more of their intentionality. Where you can craft the statement not just to be a sort of rote recitation of what are your obligations of federal law, but when you have the opportunity to use it to make a statement about some of the more affirmative commitments that you are willing to make, that you are looking towards in the ways that you approach hiring. And this can be anywhere from that "certain people are encouraged to apply," right'? Or it can be a statement about the commitments that you are making to your hiring process. I think those can be really interesting ways of flipping this really just legalese on it's head to be something that is a little bit more substantive than just a disclaimer.

Lena: Definitely. So with that in mind, when we think about when hiring discrimination can happen, even in these cases where people might have these statements in place. So again, hiring discrimination simply being unfair treatment because of your race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or disability. Given that the statements and things like that are just sort of a blanket legalese-ish statement, does that mean that hiring discrimination is still happening in a modern context, and what does that look like now, especially when we think about in an office space and professional sorts of settings?

Tahir: Yeah, so there's a couple things I want to talk about on this front. First is that list of kind of traits - race, color, religion, sex, national origin. Those are what are called protected classes. And it's important to remember that they are a little bit more malleable than you might think. When Title VII was originally passed, it was just, race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Later on the Age Discrimination and Employment act adds age as one of those protected classes, although with some caveats. The Americans with Disabilities Act adds disability. State laws - all over the map in terms of classes. [Washington] DC has kind of a couple dozen, I think. It includes marital status, family responsibilities, political affiliation. And of course, just this past Supreme Court term, the Supreme Court decided that discrimination on the basis of sex, also includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And I say that because, it's important to recognize that employment discrimination can encompass all or some of these sorts of things. But in terms of what it looks like in a modern context, I want to step back a little bit from just the law itself because what the law will tell you you can and can't do is tilted in ways that, if I'm being honest, are rooted in white supremacist ways of thinking. They might be rooted for instance in colorblindness, which might allow an organization to do fully colorblind hiring and yet not, for legal purposes, discriminate on the basis of race.

But if you step outside of that legal context, and that's something I would encourage everybody to do, is to more think of the law as the absolute floor. All you have to do to discriminate on the basis of race is to not have actively anti-racist principles in action. All you have to do to discriminate on the basis of disability is to not be building a workplace that is fully accessible; Is to not be actively looking for ways in which you can reasonably accommodate people's needs. So if you're not taking those affirmative steps, then you are at best falling into the inertia of structural oppression and institutional oppression that's literally in the air that we breath and the water we drink. Now, I'm not saying that's going to get you sued, or if it does get you sued that you'll lose. But inertia will always bring you back to hiring for the most part wealthy, able-bodied, straight, white people. And so I think that's one thing to note on this sort of front. The other thing is it's about not discriminating against people once they're hired. I saw this really fantastic infographic that was being passed around about this hiring cycle for Black women. Where it starts off at number 1, Yay! We hired somebody that's a Black woman. This is fantastic! That's like this tokenizing piece, where you celebrate your victory and you pat yourself on the back. And in the next step, the person that's being hired comes in and recognizes, "Hey, there are some problems in this workplace.” There are some things that we need to change, but instead of responding to that with a recognition that hey, we should take this seriously and think about how we make changes, it turns into gaslighting and pushing folks out, and viewing the Black woman as challenging or hard to work with. And inevitably, months later, that person leaves and it's like "Oh well we tried. We did the best that we could." And you have somebody else that you've victimized and traumatized that you put out into the world. So I think that really this is a two part thing. Just hiring can get you part of the way there, but it can't get you all of the way there.

Lena: Yeah for sure, I really appreciate that and thank you for sharing that. And I think that's so right, we know internally, we sort of see it, but being able to really point to it and say this is how it's happening. Meeting the legal barrier or legal level of "this is discrimination" versus just kind of knowing it and feeling it is a very different conversation. One of the things we're going to definitely get into is the idea of an affirmative and proactive approach. And so I have to ask you, what about Affirmative Action? What is that and is it even still legal?

Tahir: Yeah, in terms of whether or not it's still legal, I'm going to give you the really annoying lawyer answer, which is "It depends." But, where I'd start with is that there are lots of different things you could call Affirmative Action. So whether or not it complies with federal anti-discrimination law depends on a whole bunch of different variables. The reality is the court cases on affirmative action have been a complete and total mess. But there are a few things you can draw out for private employers. If you are a public employer, the rules are entirely different, because you also have to deal with constitutional issues and strict scrutiny and blah blah blah. I'm not going to go there. But for private employers, race conscious affirmative action is legal as long as the purpose of the plan is to break down old patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy, and open employment opportunities that were traditionally closed on the basis of race. The plan can't, the word that the Supreme Court uses is "trample" on the interests of White employees. So you can't sort of bludgeon them. The plan can't require that you fire a bunch of White employees and replace them with Black employees, for instance. It can't create an absolute bar to the advancement of White employees. So you can't say, we're going to stop promoting everybody except for Black employees. And this last one ends up being a place where there's a lot of challenge - the plan has to be temporary. It's not supposed to maintain a racial balance, it's supposed to eliminate a racial imbalance that already exists. So, look, this is me talking not about what should be in terms of the law, or the things that companies should be able to do or that I would encourage companies to do. But that's more kind of a statement of what is. The other thing that I would note is that in these cases, you often look at what already exists in terms of the racial imbalance. So in a lot of cases where affirmative action programs have been upheld has been because there's a statistical disparity within a particular workplace with the more broader workforce. The workforce in a city is 30 percent Black, and a workplace in that city is two percent Black, and the workplace can say, this is the disparity that we're trying to fix. You get a little bit more leeway. So, those are some of the gray areas. Now you're in pretty safe waters if you're talking about using a race conscious approach to expanding your pool of applicants as opposed to taking a race conscious approach to deciding who you are going to hire from that pool. Where imposing hiring quotas might get you in trouble. "We're going to hire 10 people and 5 of them are going to be Black." That is something that is harder to justify, not that it can't be justified, but it's much harder to justify. I've yet to see a case where suggesting that an interview pool quota is a violation of Federal law. (For example) Before we start interviewing, I'm going to wait until my pool is 10 percent Black or twenty percent Black or whatever might sort of work for you. I guess let me pause there, feel free to ask kind of more questions, because there's a lot of places you can go in terms of affirmative action and what it can look like and what doesn't work.

Lena: Well, as a teaser, we're going to get into it in just a little bit, as you know. We're going to give people some hopefully detailed ideas of how to do that. So I would love if you could just take 2 minutes and just from your perspective, again as just a human in the world, as a Black man, but also as a founding member of Law for Black Lives DC what does all this have to do with the movement for Black lives?

Tahir: Yeah, you know you think about all the hurdles that Black and Brown folks have to clear just to get to your doorstep. And as somebody that's hiring, you just don't often get a chance to see those hurdles. Those hurdles aren't always things that our traditional hiring process is designed to illuminate, right? And so for me there is no way to think about the fight for Black lives without thinking about the vast economic imbalance between Black communities and White communities in the United States. There are a thousand things that you can talk about. You can talk about the wealth that was robbed from Black communities in the process of redlining and the through the Federal Housing Administration's locking Black folks out from neighborhoods where their homes could build wealth. But you also have to look at the fact that every step along the way, all of that structural oppression that you referenced earlier, as well as the institutional oppression- all of those things are levied against the folks who are Black applicants for you. So, if we want a chance of trying to fight against those things, we have to take more active steps. We can't let the inertia continue to be the thing that impacts us.

Lena: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the reason that we've see that people are so hungry for this conversation right now, particularly in the progressive and social good space, it may have taken a while, but I think people are realizing we're really reinforcing the same problems that we see in other worlds, other sectors. We're not immune from this just because we're working for hopefully good causes and good things in the world. Thank you and don't go anywhere, we're going to have you come back and do some final thoughts and some Q & A hopefully. I'm going to take it back over here for a little bit with the setting here that Tahir gave us, which is so useful to go into other things. We talked about the legal aspects and how we got here. So just a little bit more history for you all. Again we're going to be focusing on the institutional and structural pieces of this because we cannot separate these as part of our critical analysis.Before I go into these things, remember we are as the hirers and the people in the current organizations, we're the ones and entities that are holding the power. There's a really good slide that puts the final point on some of what I think Tahir was talking about a little bit there, about some of the experiences of Black women in particular. I went back and forth talking about the individual level thing. We want to make work spaces and a hiring process that is good for individuals, but we do that by thinking about these institutional and structural processes. This tweet was floating all around, and it just to me, summed it up so perfectly. "Use caution when describing barriers. Being Black is not a barrier for me. White supremacy is the barrier. Being female is not a barrier for me, Patriarchy is the barrier. Name the systems of power. These are the barriers." We really have to think about and ensure that what we're flipping in our heads is not how do I get more Black women to be able to apply to my job, we need to flip and say how are we holding up White supremacy or patriarchy or other systems that are creating barriers to people who may be underrepresented in our organizations currently. And a lot of that we see in what I refer to simply as the hiring status quo. What I simply mean by this is that this is how we currently go through the process. We put the job post together, we recruit some people, we look at their resumes, we advance some folks and talk to them on the phone, we do a bunch of interviews, all via Zoom these days. We probably have them take some kind of written test. We confirm via reference checks and we make an offer. But this is a really staid process, and it's really a system that was built by and for a particular group of people, which was a professional, at the time, mostly White, male, class. So, we have to look at this and understand this is our history. This is those systems being set up. And so we really want to be able to flip this. One of the most common questions that I got in the pre-submit questions: pretty much everybody asked how do we recruit a more diverse pool of applicants and I'm Afraid to tell you that's just the wrong question at this point. I think Bernice King put it best. "Even the statement, "Let's invite more black people to the table," implies ownership of the table and control of who is invited. Racism is about power." So again, if we rebuild these systems then it's not about "oh did we get enough people?" We should be building a system that is more equitable because diversity will follow equity, to some of the points that Tahir made so brilliantly just a bit ago.

Just to get a little bit uncomfortable here. Hopefully you've seen in whatever other trainings you've been in, we've talked about leaning into the discomfort. This I think is a lot of what we see happening now when we talk about that recruitment aspect of why I say it's not the right question. Just hiring People of Color is not a racial equity strategy. Just getting more Black and Brown and Latinx folks into your space doesn't magically turn you into an equitable and inclusive workspace. A lot of the time the way this actually plays out in practice are the things we have here: hiring people of color only into non-management or non-leadership roles.

So they're coming in at entry level or mid-level roles, but that's kind of it. You're still not seeing People of Color and Black folks in particular in leadership positions. And often times we end up relying on staff of color to do outreach to their networks in order to reach other People of Color. And we also just do this to our friends and our colleagues quite frankly. Like the number of times I get emails of "Hey can you pass this around to your network?" and what I really know is that you're asking me to pass it to people I know who are People of Color.

And in that vein, we tend to burden our staff of Color to do the DEI - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - work, in addition to their paid work. We often put that on them in small ways and large ways all the same. And you'll actually notice this is kind of the first time we've really mentioned the word "diversity." The goal isn't to get you a quote unquote diverse pool, you have to earn that, you have to work for that. We're trying to get you a more equitable pool. You've most likely seen that graphic showing people where they're trying to look over a fence to see a baseball game. But only some people can see over the fence, because some are shorter. And then the next image shows that everyone's been given boxes so now they're all level and they can all see over the fence. So that's like that's what equitable is. To me that's not equity that's still just fixing around the edges. And what we want to do is tear down that fence. And so a lot of what we do when we think about equity in hiring is we tend to think about little tweaks to this process.

And that's fine and good and don't get me wrong, I think those things are super critical and important. You need to have a cleaner, clearer job description. You need to have an interview process where people are getting the same treatment and the same amount of time. But we actually have to take steps backwards, before we ever get to: there's a job out there and we're doing recruitment. And hiring is really a tool to evaluate. Hopefully you're have these critical conversations as an organization. If you weren't prior to this year, hopefully you are now. And hiring is going to be a really good way to look at your organization's overall equity, because you can see clear outcomes. You can see who did we get into the door ultimately. What kind of talent were we able to bring in and how are they feeling? How are current staff feeling? So what we're really doing is taking a couple of steps back and saying it's not just about getting a more diverse pool at the recruitment stage, it's about how are we developing our organization and how are we developing the roles. And so if you really have no other takeaway from this whole hour training, it's that you have to be thoughtful and intentional in building the role as well as the hiring process. Before we go on,in the chat, you can change it to all panelists and all attendees, by the way, because I think it will default to us otherwise. But I would love everyone to think about either the most recent time that you helped hire for a role, or if you have not done that then, maybe you've helped or seen a manager doing it - and think about how long they spent actually crafting the job description and the roleWas it an hour? Was it a week? Was it by committee with people throwing things into a Google doc together? Like how long did that take?

Kristin says "Two seconds, copy, paste." Yeah, did someone just use a job description that already existed? "Two days" "Not nearly enough time."

We'll give people a few more.

"A few hours over a couple of days."

Yeah, exactly. Feel free to keep chiming in, I love it. And I think this is exactly it, we so rarely spend enough time on that process. And we so rarely slow down and say what is this job description really doing?

Some folks are saying "Spent a ton of time but actually wrote it in not that much time."

"Using existing templates." There's nothing about that process-- we tend to take here's this job description, it must be good because it got a good result in the past, but we don't have any reason.

We haven't evaluated why that is and what is going on. And I think that's really a big thing. Sometimes we just have to slow down and be thoughtful.

Somebody did spend weeks on it! Yeah, for better or worse, but hopefully that's a good reaction.

But some of that challenges we see is because we don't have those clear organizational development things in place, and process in place to make that cleaner and easier so that we are developing roles with the whole organization in mind. Alright so we're going to come back to that.

But I'm going to come back to Affirmative Action. And we're going to have to roll through this pretty quickly, because the goal is not for you to become an expert on Affirmative Action, and as Tahir noted, this is a tricky concept and when and why it's used is tricky, but it's a really helpful framework because I think of Affirmative Action as being about proactively attacking the foundational problems and taking corrective action. I do want to be clear about a historical aspect which is that Affirmative Action has historically best benefited women and veterans. And it's particularly benefited White women and White veterans. The perception of course has been that it gives stronger preference to Black people.But there's literally no data to back that up, and most of that belief is generated by racist ideals. So Affirmative Action is part of something to help protect and adjust, but there's some really good lessons to learn. And so I draw the framework that I'm going to walk through from David Benjamin Oppenheimer's article on Distinguishing 5 Models of Affirmative Action. We will include a link to that on the website after this, but I'm going to save you the reading of an academic article and just give you the gist. There are 5 models and some of them are very applicable and useful.

First, Model 1 - "Strict quotas favoring women or minorities."

Model 2: "Preference systems in which women or minorities are given some preference over white men." So this is what Tahir talked about. This is what people tend to think of when we address Affirmative Action, but it's not necessarily what we actually suggest doing or why. There are particular aspects in which, like Tahir talked about, where in Federal situations and things like that, it might be critical to do this. But generally we're not actually suggesting doing this because Oppenheimer really points out that without the other models, which we'll get into, these are just set up for failures. This is just set up for tokenizing people, or doing the thing we were talking about earlier, thinking that simply hiring People of Color is going to solve our equity problems. That's not what we want to recommend. However, one thing we think that we can take away from these models, and the idea of quotas or preference systems or whatever that may look like, is that what we can apply is measuring us. Measuring ourselves.

What does our current staff look like?

How many Black people? Latinx? Native?

Asian? Middle Eastern people are on staff?

How many of them are in leadership positions or non-leadership positions?

And when we're looking at our hiring pools are we at least evaluating and checking ourselves and saying are we getting enough folks from a diverse pool, however we choose to define that, in the various stages? And are people dropping off in later stages? Suddenly we're getting to interviews and suddenly everyone is White again - hang on what's going on? We need to address that. Putting metrics in place just internally to help as an evaluation tool and to examine that organizational, foundational problem can be really useful.

Model 5, we're skipping to 5 and going to go in reverse a little bit… Model 5 is Affirmative commitments not to discriminate. We talked about this quite a bit already. This is the Equal Opportunity Employment statements and I would also argue the more recent implicit bias trainings. So obviously these are good, they can be useful things. Having commitments and stating that we encourage folks to apply who might be People of Color or disabled or whatever that looks like. But it's really a pretty passive act at this point in time, and honestly at this point this is the bare minimum to have that affirmative commitment not to discriminate.

Model 4, this is the one you all love. "Outreach plans in which attempts are made to include more women and minorities within the pool of persons from which selections are made." I don't love the word minorities, but this is within a different context, so we're just going to keep going with that. But the idea being that we are going to take action to post it to lots of websites, we're going to make sure it's not just a google doc getting emailed around, right? We need to kill that habit by the way. We need to get rid of the habit of just sending a Google doc job description around and thinking you're going to even remotely get a wide variety of people in your pool, it's just a huge barrier. And it's something that is still very unique I think to the progressive space. But the reason that we also aren't focusing too much on Model 4, even though I know it's your favorite question, is that it's going back to that earlier question. This puts so much of the expectation or the belief on the quote unquote diverse candidates. Remember what we saw earlier, it's not about being Black or being a woman that holds you back

It's about systems of White supremacy. It's about systems of racism. It's about the structures we put in place to hold people back.

So Model 3 is where we're landing. Model 3 is "Self-examination plans in which the failure to reach expected goals within expected periods of time triggers self-study, to determine whether discrimination is interfering with a decision making process." And I love this. So what does a time trigger for self-examination look like? It's right now. It's that you have joined this webinar and you're talking about it, hopefully before you've ever put a job description out into the field. Because we need to stop and look at each stage and figure out why is this happening? Why have we not historically had more People of Color, more disabled folks on staff. What's going on? And we usually just don't take that examination So we can do this by putting these models together and collecting some metrics and looking at our evaluation process, but we have to do this deep self examination work So, let's put that into practice, cause you're like okay, great, got it, get into the details please. This again is about critical examination. One of the things that I think is just out there is that we've been trained to believe that if we can simply build a flawless and meritocratic hiring process, we will find the most qualified person. And we tweeted about this before the webinar, but meritocracy is just a false premise. We have to just eliminate the idea. It's so tightly wound in my head to the same idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I'm the granddaughter of immigrants, and that was just the belief to immigrant families. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, everyone else did it, you figure it out too. And that's just a false premise. So we have to understand that this system, if we just go through the motions, is not going to be a non-biased system. It is baked into it. But again we can be more empathetic and we can be more thoughtful and make sure we're not raising impossible barriers for people to get over by making them literally jump through all these hoops throughout this process. For example, one big stage is the resumes and cover letters. We have not yet found a good alternative to resumes and cover letters, I'm looking forward to that someday, but at the bare minimum we need to acknowledge that resumes and cover letters are really only an indication of how good someone is at writing a resume and a cover letter. They don't tell you much else about the person. Resume literally means "summary." It's just a summary of some things that they did that they thought were important to put on and squeeze into one piece of paper, because that's what they were told to do. And if you ask 10 different people their opinions on the perfect resume, you're absolutely going to get 10 different answers. So we need to let go of this idea that that is the only truth and that this process of sitting down with rigid interviews and tasks is the way to get to the reality of what someone is about.

This all assumes that you've written a good job description in the first place and that you've actually gotten the types of folks that are applying. We also know that in job descriptions, we tend to throw everything in there. This is why I go back to "why?" and "how long did you spend crafting your last job description?" We spend so much time just throwing everything in and then trying to figure out why isn't anyone meeting our expectations. And I would challenge all of our thinking of, what of these things are really needed versus what can someone realistically learn on the job? Because I think that's a barrier to everybody when they're trying to find new work. To maybe think of it another way, why do you want someone who comes in with every single skill set, anyway? You want them to have room to grow, so that they can have an opportunity to stretch their wings and hopefully stay in your organization for a long time. One of the people who I know is on here always points out to me "Why do people move around so much in our space?" And there's some good reasons for why that happens, but also if we want some of these organizations to have true, transformational change they kind of need people to be in there and stay for the long haul. And that means giving people opportunities to grow and professionally mature. So some critical evaluation questions. One is "How are you evaluating the whole of a person?" Are you getting hung up at the resume stage? And like you don't like their formatting? Whatever, who cares? What does someone's resume formatting really tell you about someone? Versus is this person intriguing enough that I at least want to keep talking to them and learn more about them and move them forward in the process?

"How is your organization earning someone's experience and knowledge?" We're asking them to earn a job. They have to keep proving to us through this whole process that they can do this job, but it should be a two-way street. We should be earning them too. We should be able to earn both the things they can put down on paper and the knowledge that's just hard to capture in something like a resume or a task. We really have to think about what are we doing and how is our organization shaped so that we're able to take advantage of all of someone's experience and skills, even if we didn't necessarily think about them and include them in our job description.

And of course, as we're going through here "How are you applying Model 3's self examination?" Do you have pause points and are you willing to slow down and say, hang on, somethings going wrong with our process. Let's re-evaluate. Are you willing to take a step back if your job pool is off the rails. We just did that today with a client, actually. Without getting much into, we were like This isn't going as well as we would like. Let's take a step back. Let's take a breather and figure out why that's going on. And I think that's so important and it's going to result in such a better solution and fit for them in the end.

Not shockingly, we're going over time, so I'm just going to go through two really brief slides and then we're going to go to questions, because I'm sure there are many right now. We will be providing all these slides online later, and we're going to be following up.

I said at the beginning, this is like your 201 class. 301 is coming. And eventually you can get your masters. But we're always all going to be learning. There are some good questions we can be continuing to ask ourselves to figure out if our processes are actually more equitable? Are we taking the time for self examination of our hiring? Are we using our existing positions as tools, if you have a job description or one that you recently did - using it to go and examine - Wait a minute, is this working? Is everything in place to make this smooth? Where did we get stuck? Where are we getting hung up? Where are we having issues getting the kind of outcome we would hope for? Are we "Being honest and respectful with staff and applicants?" Some of you referred to that you did get input from folks, but how are they able to give feedback and make sure this job description and whole process really reflects what we're looking for and need. "Are we addressing the root policies (or lack thereof) that impact hiring?"

I was talking about the example of a Google doc being used as a way to share a job description. That's actually a policy and a process that can be very easily fixed and just putting it out there more publicly besides just the google doc, things like that. A very big plug for proactively offering accommodations for folks with disabilities. And I also want to add acting with empathy all the time. And being respectful that you're asking someone to do unpaid time and work to apply for a job, but particularly during COVID -19. The number of times I've been on an interview and a kid or a pet has come crashing in - it happens all the time but we try to establish before I ever talk to them that that's OK. I'm not going to be upset if the kid does come crashing in, these are the realities of what folks have to deal with right now. And we have some questions we want to make sure we're avoiding. We want to make sure we're not burdening our staff of color, Black and Brown staff, to help us “achieve diversity. ”

We want to make sure we're not demanding too much time and energy of applicants. And we're not putting impossible barriers up for people to leap over to get these roles. We are not going to spend time on this because this is actually just a sneak peek anyway. Like I said, we're going to be having lots more resources and trainings to come. We're going to get into so much more. There's so many places where we see people misstep on this. There's a lot of places that we'll help you hopefully through as time goes on.

We're so excited to continue to share that. So where to from here. First stick around for Q & A, don't jump off. I know people always start to jump off when people are wrapping up, but don't, please. It's going to be great. So first if we did go through any terms or ideas, cause this is a very meaty webinar - google those things, get into the weeds on those. Gather metrics on past hiring. Look around at your staff right now, what's going on? Read old job descriptions with your new mindset.

And of course, shameless plug, follow us @solutionsmeso on Twitter, follow us on Linkedin. And we would love if you would get in touch, because we're definitely going to do more of these events. And we're going to be posting lots more to the blog, including the follow up to this webinar. So with that, I'm going to open it to Q&A. So please, please, please, try to use the Q&A functionality, not the chat functions, just because they get a little bit lost there. So I'm going to stop sharing the screen, but I just want to say quickly before we do that. Thank you to my whole team - Temi, Paige, Lara and the Advisory Board of Meso Solutions. Gretchen Wieland and Aisha Shah from Buoy Marketing, who are fantastic. And Alida and Quentin who helped out with the logistics for this stuff. And so many others that I can't even begin to name so just thank you all for everyone's support and help. I'm going to stop this share so you can see our lovely faces again and we're going to go to some questions. Looks like we've got....Alright, a couple questions that are coming in.

One, and I think this is a really good question, and we'll definitely have more materials coming out about this. Someone is asking: "How do you avoid tokenism and allowing diversity to follow more equitable systems without waiting for the rest of society's racist situations to improve?” And actually Tahir, I'd love if you have any thoughts on that, I certainly have strong thoughts on tokenism and the issues around that, but I want to give you an opportunity to chime in there.

Tahir: Yeah, certainly. I think that it's importantly to think carefully about what we mean by tokenism. I don't think it is tokenistic to be seeking to hire more People of Color, for instance. To be actively looking to hire more Black folks. To put into practice the sorts of ideas that Lena was just talking about. Because the idea is that that gives you an opportunity, not just to choose the first Black person that walks in the door, or the first person with any disability that walks in the door because you're trying to check a box, but rather that what you're doing is trying to reshape and redevelop the way in which you are doing your hiring in general, as well as your internal management. It is not I think tokenizing to set a goal, to have metrics. But what I think is problematic, and what you want to be avoiding when it comes to tokenizing is thinking about hiring somebody as having checked a box. As being your marker for success. I would guess that for any organization here that is not already Black led and for many of the organizations that are Black led, hiring one more Black person or one more Brown person is not going to be sufficient to be a marker of you having achieved success in terms of your systems. So that's a little bit in terms of how I think about it.

Lena: Yeah, definitely. We've got another question here, and a couple versions of a similar question. Basically, folks are talking about how do we think about the job description to resume to interview process, as well in terms of what that can look like and how that can exacerbate various hiring. So a lot of it again of why we've taken this zoom out to look at the structures, is just to kind of raise the awareness that this system we've put in place is not based on any research that says this is the best way to hire and the best way to find out about someone is through these steps. We want to just give people some structural tools to evaluate their processes and say where are things going wrong. This is why I do like metrics and why I think it's helpful is, if you do have that data from past hires, you can say where did People of Color or people with disabilities fall out of this process? Because that's a good way to say, we need to back up and examine. Because I agree, that's not about, ok we are failing with x. Something about this system is no longer equitable. In a perfect world, your ratios of People of Color, folks with disabilities, should stay relatively the same throughout the process, and if it's not then something is definitely off.

But basically what people are asking about, and I just want to say this is going to be a big follow up point for us, and we're going to have blogs and stuff about challenges. The pros and cons of resumes. The pros and cons of things like tasks versus interviews, because all of these have advantages and disadvantages. We need to continue as a community to be creative about what our alternatives are and how we're assessing them. And this is where I think that the idea of empathy is so critical, because someone in here noted "For example interviews can exacerbate the disparities in hiring, particularly for people with disabilities, because interviews can tend to favor extroverted people, people who are chatty, people who may look a particular way." And that's absolutely true, I've definitely seen that. And so thinking about how do we use different tools and resources to our availability to do that better.

A really simple example that I've used a few times is where I've interviewed people and I can tell almost right away that they are introverted and they're not super comfortable with just the process and the format that an interview is in. So we'll have a good conversation and then I'll provide questions as follow up in writing, to say hey I'd really love to know more about this thing from you. And give them the space to answer in a format that they need. And especially when those are jobs that don't require - you know, I don't need an extroverted person for those roles, it doesn't matter. They can work and function in that way and still be entirely successful and not just introversion but other things that prevent folks from being able to communicate in rapid time via video call. I'm a fast talker, I know I'm a fast talker. We have to make those adjustments for folks and make sure everyone is able to work in the way they can work best. There's lots of little things like that. That's why when I sort of teasered the 301 level, you saw there were a lot of different things - that's the challenge here. There's so many things we can trip over and end up either favoring a homogeneous candidate that looks like what we already look like, or going the other way and tokenizing. This is why we call it a critical examination. It's not about executing five steps to a more equitable hiring process. It's about "do we really look at deeply each of these things."

With that, I know we're at time and we only got to a couple questions, but we did kind of answer the big one again about diversifying your pools in the process of the conversation here. So, Tahir, just a minute of any closing thoughts from you?

Tahir: Yeah, I think the last thing that I would say is, look for people that might be able to shine in ways that you don't expect. I think it's really easy as people going through the hiring process to try to figure out how can I cross this person off? How can I get my list smaller? And for me, I want to start by making the list bigger. I want try to think about how can this person shine in ways that are not necessarily apparent to me right now and what process can I put into place, what structure can I give to allow those folks the space to shine their brightest.

Lena: I couldn't have said it better, so I'm not even going to give a final closing thought because that was perfect. Again, I just want to thank everyone for joining, I know that you all had so many questions and we didn't even begin to get into all of them, but like I said there's more coming. Again, I'll throw the slide back up, but follow us on Twitter, follow our email list and we'll be providing more resources and information soon. This is just the beginning. And thank you all so much for joining. And with that have a great afternoon wherever you are!

Tahir: Thanks everyone, Bye.