Behind the Scenes on Our Anti-Racism Journey (Part IV)

Overview

This is the third post in our series on Uncharted’s ongoing journey to be an anti racist organization. We’re taking intentional steps, but we’re also struggling, and the goal of this series is to provide a behind-the-scenes look into questions we’re asking, the progress we’re making, and the challenges we’re facing. This week, we’re focusing on the topic of hiring and how it intersects with our anti racist work.

In this post, we are going to get into the nitty gritty of our hiring practices. We’ll outline our current metrics, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, reflections, and questions we’d love help answering. As a people-first organization, we believe that hiring is one of the most important decisions we make organizationally. Our people are our best resource and the heartbeat of our work. Historically, hiring is also a space that is riddled with bias, power dynamics, and systemic racism — as well as incredible opportunity for change and impact.

Goals and Metrics

To set the stage with some of our baseline metrics, our self identified current team demographics show that women are well-represented in our org, and that though we have an overall aligned representation of BIPOC staff, we follow similar trends where they’re disproportionately represented at lower pay grades and seniority.

When we think about hiring and the diversity on our current and future team, we think about it in the context of two questions:

• As a team, are we representative of our current and future target audience? In our case our target audience is the entrepreneurs we work with, and to answer this question we need to look at our current portfolio of entrepreneurs and the future portfolio as well. Our current portfolio of entrepreneurs are 48% female or non-binary and 38% of them entrepreneurs are founders of color.
• Are we, as a team, representative of how the demographics in the US are shifting in the future? We want our team to reflect the future demographic trends and not just be pegged to this moment in time. More on this below.

Just by looking at these statistics at this moment in time, our team demographics (on the whole) are representative of our target audience. But given our equity-based strategy, we plan to grow both the percentage of female and non-binary founders and the percentage of founders of color in our portfolio. Further, demographics at the organizational level conceal other disparities at different seniority levels within the organization. Quite plainly, organization wide demographic statistics belie the nature of the problem; we are the least diverse amongst those with the most seniority in the organization, and that’s a problem we’re committed to tackling over time.

One of our five organizational values is “We take the long view.” We strive to look at the long-term in everything we do, which has led us to pay attention to US Census projections that by 2045 (only 25 years from now), the majority of Americans will be people of color. The United States is becoming more and more diverse at a faster rate than even projected three years ago. We aspire to be an organization that is pacing with those changes, not lagging behind them. We’ll discuss this more below.

These factors have us thinking more about the hiring infrastructure we build for the long-term instead of focusing hire-by-hire. If we have learned anything, it is that rushed and reactive hiring processes produce the same results and the usual suspects. The enemy of building a hiring strategy infused with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles is the pressure to hire quickly. Reactive leads to more of the same. Rushed invites more bias. Slow is smart. Long-term planning leads to long-term results.

Our current hiring processes + candidate demographics

Our hiring process has five stages — application, twenty minute phone interviews, one hour Zoom interviews and project, and then a half day working session to review the project. After this, we move forward with references and make an offer to the final candidate. In total, this usually takes about 8+ weeks from putting out a job description to sending an offer. This is an improvement on how long our processes have taken in the past. We are constantly holding the tension between creating expedient processes to benefit our applicants and creating thoughtful processes that result in the best hires. These two are not mutually exclusive, but are difficult to hold together well.

In the last six hiring processes we’ve been through, we’ve had an average of 186 people apply, of which approximately 64% were female or non-binary, but less than 10% were BIPOC individuals. In the phone interview stage and one hour interview stages, approximately 70% of interviewees were female or non-binary, and around 30% were BIPOC individuals. In our final interviews, over 75% were female or non-binary identifying and over 35% were BIPOC individuals. This resulted in hiring one male and five female teammates, 50% of whom are BIPOC individuals. During this time, we hired three women, two of whom are BIPOC employees through non-traditional hiring practices (recruiters and promotion from internship), and these aren’t reflected in the stats

In nonprofit and social impact work, it is not unusual for applicants and teams to skew heavily female, so while these statistics for gender diversity may seem impressive in other sectors, they are par for the course in our industry. And the social sector space is riddled with it’s own issues despite high percentages of females on their teams. According to a 2015 GuideStar report: While 75% of the social sector workforce is female, only 18% of nonprofits with large budgets ($50M+) had a female CEO and there is a 23% pay gap for women in nonprofit leadership positions. On our team, while we have strong gender diversity across the team, our C-suite and board are still predominantly male, which we are working to change.

Our overall metrics are an improvement from past hiring statistics and reflect the changing demographics of our team, but we recognize that we have a long way to go as we work to reflect the increasing diversity of our founders that we serve, as well as the projected US Census data, specifically as it relates to BIPOC representation.

• While 75% of the social sector workforce is female, only 18% of nonprofits with large budgets ($50M+) had a female CEO (couldn’t find data on small nonprofits).
• 23% pay gap for women in nonprofit leadership positions.

What has worked + learnings/challenges/insights

Building out a bench so we don’t hire when it hurts and are in a rush, but can have qualified people

We feel the pressure for quick turnaround times in hiring like many organizations, and the nature of our work, especially when we are working with partners on accelerators has really highlighted this pressure for our team. The outcomes of rushed processes usually mean leaning back on personal networks, and while some of our best hires have come from our network, since we have had a fairly homogeneous team, there is a tension with regard to how this directly impacts the diversity of the team.

To combat the tendency towards similarity bias that is driven by quick turnarounds and leaning on our network to find candidates for open roles, we have begun building out a ‘bench’ of incredible people that we can reach out to when we know we need to make a new hire. They have been ‘pre-qualified’ through an informational meeting with our team, have some background about Uncharted, and are open to considering upcoming roles. When a role opens up, we look back through this list, invite them to apply, but also if the timing is off for them personally to share the role with their networks as pipeline partners. This, in addition to our Hiring Radar and keeping open applications for roles we frequently hire for has given us a head start on finding great candidates when we need to expand our team.

It is worth noting that this ‘bench’ process isn’t without it’s holes too. While we’re trying to level the playing field and solve for one issue (hiring at pain points), that we’ve also created a new potential problem in this system by potentially wasting someone’s time by letting them apply for a role that’s not open, or valuing or giving a leg up to people who have the flexibility to just always be looking for jobs. In this case, we believe the potential benefit to outweigh the costs, and are continuing utilizing this method as a pilot.

Opening up for people to work remotely, so we’re not just hiring from the Denver network

The demographics of Denver, where Uncharted is headquartered, are different from overall national demographics. In the past, we had required that all team members live or relocate to the Denver metro area, which presented a challenge to having a diverse local pool of candidates, or asking some BIPOC candidates to move to a less diverse city. We contracted The HR Shop in 2019 to review our hiring processes, and as a part of that started to explore how our candidate pools might change if we allowed the team to work wherever in the US they’d like to. When we shifted to remote work because of COVID-19 in March 2020, we also adjusted all job descriptions to be able to be remote or relocated to Denver if they desired (when possible, for roles other than our Office Manager, etc). This has opened up entirely new networks of diverse talent and we are excited to see how this creates more opportunity for a dynamic team in the years to come.

Adapting our JDs, communication, and transparency to reduce power imbalances

In the past few years, we’ve made several adjustments to our public job descriptions to help level out some of the power imbalances that are present in most hiring processes. For every role, we publish a salary range for that position. Studies have shown that lack of salary transparency, disproportionately affects women and people of color, as well as those who are not skilled at negotiating in general! While the final offer we give to a candidate may change based on experience, location, or finalized job responsibilities, we do operate on a clear budget and have done the work to create a fair range for the role — that isn’t based on their race or gender. Sharing this information up front can bring an ease to the process with a candidate, ensuring they are getting paid a fair wage for their work that is based on clear calculations that are standard across the team.

We also asked The HR Shop for help with the language we use to describe a role in our job descriptions. Ensuring that we aren’t using insider language, buzz words, or exclusionary terminology helps candidates from diverse backgrounds see themselves in the role. This year, we also added FAQs, LinkedIn profiles of the teammates the candidate would work closely with, and clear timelines to offer as much transparency and power back to candidates as possible.

Resetting our hiring systems to combat bias

In the past, we created a brief that was sent to the entire team about final candidates called a Snapshot. This was great to quickly catch up team members about candidates before they stepped into interviews, but was riddled with bias based from the person who was writing it, as it editorialized information about their background, ‘our’ concerns, and what ‘we’ were excited about. We have eliminated this and instead send hiring teams all background information (resume, projects, etc) but don’t add any biased editorialization regarding these candidates.

During the project phase of the interview, we have blinded the submissions, ensuring that no one who is evaluating knows which candidate’s materials they are looking at. Here’s how this works: we ask someone on the team who isn’t involved in the hiring process at all to collect the projects from candidates as they come in. The projects are stripped of any distinguishing information and loaded into Google Drive as Candidate Project A, B, C, etc. Each person uses a scorecard to grade against a standardized rubric of the objectives of the project. The Director of People and Partnerships and hiring manager then review those evaluation scorecards deciding which projects were best based on the preset metrics, and utilize this data to help us choose who to move into the next round of interviews.

Prior to an interview we give each interviewer specific objectives from the JD to interview around, a scorecard related to these objectives , and help them craft questions for their interview that hit each. Hiring teams then send back all of their notes and assessment based on these scorecard objectives to the Director of People and Partnerships. We compile those and give them to the decision maker (hiring manager) on the role for final decisions.

What has not worked + learnings, challenges, and insights

Our experience so far tells us that we’re struggling in the following areas:

• We are not a diverse looking team on the website. We are a white-led organization, and the feedback we have received is that even though we are about 50% staff of color, we are perceived as a white organization.
• Our team’s racial diversity is more strongly concentrated in more junior roles, which can be perceived as a lack of commitment to diverse leadership.
• We have leaned on our current networks for hiring, rather than building out new ones to attract a broader pool of applicants.
• We have traditionally hired when it hurts as opposed to hiring year round and building relationships with candidates consistently.

Since our team does not look diverse on the website, past BIPOC candidates have told us they wonder what it would be like to work at Uncharted and it has discouraged them from continuing in hiring processes as they wonder if they’d find psychological safety and belonging on our team. The literal demographics of the team need to become more diverse to help grow that safety and belonging for future staff, and we also need to work to showcase the stories of the diversity of our team — who in reality do represent many elements of diversity that don’t show up in a staff photo. We must become better storytellers about the amazing humans on our team — some who identify as LGBTQIA+, some who are immigrants to the US, some spouses of those in the military, and many other beautiful elements of diversity that add strength to our organization. There are no diverse individuals, there are diverse teams. So, we must speak honestly to the current diversity that we have, while setting a vision for how much more diverse we hope to become.

We also need to hire more diverse leadership at the senior levels of the organization. As showcased in the stats at the beginning of this post, while we are growing in the diversity of our team, this is not reflected as much at the highest levels of leadership in the organization. We must work to hire more individuals from underrepresented groups in the entrepreneurial, philanthropy, and social impact spaces that have been systematically excluded. And for the more junior female and BIPOC staff members, we need to create pathways to promotion so they are represented at higher levels in the organization.

Finally, while focusing on inclusion and belonging like we’ve described in other posts is the foundation for building a diverse team, there is real work to be done in hiring processes as well. Our culture, inclusion, and belonging pieces have been a strength at Uncharted, but developing the relationships and pipeline partnerships have lagged. Historically, we’ve focused on evolving the pipeline of candidates, our hiring processes, and equitable hiring practices when we are extra stretched, feeling the need for new team members. This has meant that we have not given the attention to revolutionizing our processes, building deep relationships, and asking the hard questions that would lead to better outcomes. Adjusting our priorities to work on the relationship, pipeline, and processes in the “off-season” for hiring has brought strength, but this is long, slow work — especially as a small team that doesn’t have a lot of at bats per year with open roles. This requires year round relationship building with individual candidates and pipeline partners, which has been difficult to prioritize on a small team.

Analysis and Reflections

We are not the first organization to ask questions about how to work to be more anti-racist, equitable, and inclusive in our hiring practices. This is a widely discussed topic in People Ops and HR spaces, with various experts weighing in with their advice. Typically, the question comes down to how to diversify hiring pipelines — literally, what job boards should I use. In reality, it is a much more nuanced discussion that requires taking a deep look into every step of the hiring process. We must work diligently, year round to build genuine relationships and new networks to meet candidates. We have to be creative in how we write our job descriptions to use inclusionary language and help the imagination of candidates who may apply to see themselves in the role. We must create processes to reduce bias and increase transparency for candidates. We should use our power in the hiring process to create safety and space for people to truly explore a new role with our company. And finally, we must continue to create inclusive, dynamic organizations where people can bring their whole selves and belong.

We have a long way to go here, and many of our approaches have felt more evolutionary than revolutionary. We want to learn from other organizations taking bold approaches to hiring and who have seen real change in the diversity of their team, especially as it relates to underrepresented communities in this space.

And, we want to meet the next batch of incredible humans that should be a part of the Uncharted team. It would be a missed opportunity to end this post without mentioning that we’ll be opening up some new roles in the coming months and would love to hear from you if you’d like to join on this journey with us! Keep your eye on our hiring page, join our hiring radar, or shoot us a line to recommend a friend who would be a great addition.

Questions

• How do people set hiring goals for diversity?
• What are authentic ways that people have diversified their pipeline of applicants?
• Outside of racial diversity, we also have found that many of our applicants come from homogenous backgrounds socio-economically and educationally. How have teams written job descriptions and adapted to encourage those from different backgrounds to apply?