How We Are Working to Make Our Hiring Process More Equitable
Picture by Tim Mossholder
By: Cat Tarvin
At Kinetic West, we believe strongly that anti-racism must be a sustained and integral practice within our firm. This means we focus on self-reflection and concrete action to oppose systemic racism, both in our external work with clients and partners, and in our internal work as a team. We also acknowledge that we are always on a journey to becoming better for everyone we interact with and there is much we can improve upon as a firm.
Last fall, our team focused on applying an equity lens to one of our critical internal functions: our hiring practices. We aspire to be a firm that not only serves diverse communities and clients, but also represents varied backgrounds and perspectives within our staff. We know that our work benefits from diverse voices, especially people with a range of lived experiences who are traditionally underrepresented in positions of power and decision-making, including consulting. This commitment to equitable hiring practices is driven by our desire to create the strongest team possible for every project, and to support that team in bringing their lived and learned expertise to both our clients and within our own organization.
In order to work towards our vision, we sought internal staff feedback and researched best practices around equity and inclusion in hiring. We broke down our hiring process into the component parts and assessed each step individually – from communication and marketing of positions to how people apply, and finally the interview process.
We aren’t claiming to have perfected the process. In fact, we are still working towards our vision and learning as we go. But knowing that many other organizations are wrestling with the same question – how do we create an equitable hiring process? – we wanted to share what changes we made and what our experience has looked like so far.
Our hiring process reboot focused on:
1) Increased transparency by sharing more career information publicly and using inclusive terms in our job postings
Kinetic West has always included salary in our job descriptions, but we wanted to make the process even more transparent. We updated the Career Page on the Kinetic West website to include all our benefits (e.g., healthcare, PTO, 401K contribution, etc.), expected career trajectory, and all the steps in our hiring process. We want applicants to be clear from the start about the expectations of our interview process, how they will be compensated if hired, and what kind of future growth they can expect in the role. We know that our hiring process is lengthy so we aim to be upfront about it from the beginning so applicants can choose to opt-in to our process and not feel like there are any surprises.
To attract talent from different personal and professional backgrounds, we also focused on using inclusive terminology and sharing more specific details about what happens in our interview process. We removed requirements for graduate degrees and had an outside expert review the language of our job posting to ensure we were using clear, accessible language instead of consulting jargon. To facilitate sharing, we ensured that every applicant got an informational interview with a member of our team during the first round to answer questions and share more about what the next rounds will look like. We wanted to encourage those applicants who came from backgrounds other than consulting to feel confident applying and set them up for success.
2) Changed our application format to short answer questions rather than a cover letter
The purpose of a cover letter is to give the hiring manager deeper and more nuanced information about an applicant beyond their resume. However, most cover letters are just the applicant’s best guess at what the hiring manager wants to know, and we have found that traditional cover letters primarily tell you who has the best cover letter formula, rather than who is the best fit for the role. We also know that cover letters are a deterrent for many applicants, and it is hard to avoid bias as a reviewer when looking at a cover letter.
Having gone through several rounds of hiring at Kinetic West already, we had a good sense of the kinds of questions we usually want to know about an applicant beyond their resume (e.g., their interest in consulting, their expertise in integrating equity into their professional work, etc.). So, instead of requiring a cover letter where an applicant has to try and read our minds, we now ask three short answer questions that get directly to what we really want to know about a candidate.
Feedback on our new application process has been really encouraging with applicants noting the difference this approach makes in their experience. It also gives us a sense of who people are and not how well they are able to fit the formula of how to write a cover letter.
3) Created a demographic baseline to compare to future hiring cycles
Research tells us that you can’t move what you don’t measure. In previous hiring cycles, we had informally tracked race/ethnicity and gender identity, especially in comparing finalists to the overall applicant pool, but for this cycle, we wanted to be more explicit. We wanted to set a baseline that we could use for future accountability and be able to evaluate how applicants move through our hiring process.
Using voluntary data provided by applicants through our new application form, we are now able to track who applied for which roles, who moved on to the next stage, and who ultimately got hired and filter that data by race/ethnicity and gender identity. Setting this baseline allows us to track where we need to focus on further addressing equity in our process, including how we build our recruitment pool (e.g., more recruitment of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other candidates of color), and what implicit biased might be creeping into our applicant evaluations.
4) Incorporated a donation to a charity for those who participate in all three of our hiring steps
We know that our hiring process is challenging and lasts several weeks. We are a small company, and this longer process allows us to really get to know applicants, and for them to really get to know and understand us and the type of consulting that we do. However, one of our principles for our hiring process is now “Give at least as much as you ask” and we wanted to be sure that we were living that value in our hiring process.
For this round, we invited applicants who made it to the final step to pick a charity to receive a $100 donation from Kinetic West on their behalf. This donation is an acknowledgment of the hard work and time commitment applicants gave to us in the hiring process, which can take up to 8 weeks to complete.
We aren’t done yet
We know we aren’t done yet. Part of this journey means acknowledging that we are still in the work, and we must be consistently assessing ourselves, researching best practices, talking to experts, and integrating new practices.
We already have plans to improve our next hiring cycle with a focus on how we recruit people to the firm. This means not solely leveraging our personal networks but doing intentional and targeted outreach to community organizations and developing relationships with diverse professional groups that will help build a pipeline of diverse talent that is interested in applying to our roles. We want to start earlier, building those connections and relationships before we even have positions to post. We want to learn what these organizations are looking for in employers, and how we can better support them and their members.
Combined with the practices we already have in place, we intend to keep ourselves accountable, to checking our implicit bias, getting the best people in the room, and setting them up to succeed once they join Kinetic West. The more diverse our team becomes, the better we are able to serve, support, and reflect our community, so it’s essential that we never stop improving.
We’d love to talk more about what an intentional hiring practice could look like for you or connect on how you’ve done similar work at your organization. At Kinetic West we are dedicated to relationships, and we love hearing from our network about how we can be better together.