Hiring BIPOC Leaders: Reflections & Promising Practices
Whether you’re looking to hire or be hired, applying for jobs is harder than ever. It’s no surprise that systemic barriers for BIPOC communities extend into hiring and interview processes; In the past few years, we received dozens of asks from organizations looking to diversify their staff and bring on more BIPOC teammates.
At Moonshot, we just completed a six-month hiring season to bring on our two new incredible teammates, Daranee Teng, Managing Director of Programs, and Jordan Roehl, Senior Operations Associate and Cohort 3 alumna. If you know us, you know we love reflection and processing, so we’re taking some space to do just that about our most recent challenging season, in hopes of paying it forward to those who are still in process of hiring or applying. While our focus at Moonshot is centering on the perspectives and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, we believe that more equitable hiring practices will benefit everyone.
We worked with a search firm (RCG Talent) for both search processes (RCG also led or supported the search for Kat, Sasha, Alex, and VJ’s roles so we go waaay back). We’ve worked with search firms before and also have run searches internally, and knew that the cost would be worth it for the expertise RCG brings, especially around the design of equitable hiring processes and diverse recruitment, and for our limited staff capacity (#startuplife). We know this isn’t feasible for all organizations, especially small community-based nonprofits, and so our reflections below include promising practices whether or not you work with an outside firm.
Tips for Hiring BIPOC Leaders
Pay people for their time. Performance tasks that ask applicants to create new content (versus asking them to submit previous work samples) are asking applicants to give not just time but their intellectual content. Applicants today are applying for anywhere between 21 and 80 jobs before receiving an offer, on average¹. A job application process, on average, takes approximately 24 days to move through². That is a HUGE amount of time, both in hours spent on applying, and days waiting, for every job an applicant decides to go for. Honestly, paying people for their performance tasks, in some ways, doesn’t feel like enough. But it’s a good start. If a candidate is expected to spend either more than 15 minutes on a task, or if they are expected to create their own intellectual property, pay them for it.
Don’t bullsh*t the candidates. We’ve heard plenty of horror stories (and experienced them ourselves) of organizations putting all People of Color on the interview panel, only for the new hire to learn that those are the ONLY People of Color in the entire organization. Show the candidates up front who you are, and let them decide if that’s an organization they want to work for. If you don’t have a diverse staff YET, but are working towards it, be honest about that with the candidates and prepare yourself for some hard questions, or for BIPOC candidates to drop out of the process.
Hold yourself to the same standards as you’re holding candidates. Do you care about typos in a cover letter? Then there shouldn’t be typos in your candidate materials. Are you looking for someone personable, outgoing and friendly? Talk with your team about how to explicitly create a warm, inviting atmosphere in the interview space. One way to create more equitable hiring systems is to create an experience where every candidate gets something out of the experience, whether or not they get the gig.
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM BIPOC APPLICANTS ON THE HIRING PROCESS
We could go on and on, but who better to share reflections and learnings than folks who were just in the process? Read on below to hear from our two newest teammates on what they’d recommend for organizations, particularly those looking to diversify their staff.
Jordan: Pay people for their time and ideas [during interview conversations or performance tasks], if that idea is also used past the interview process that person should continue to get compensation if they are not hired onto the team.
Daranee: Being asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement that protected me and my work samples as my intellectual property made me feel valued as an applicant during Moonshot’s hiring process. I had never heard of this practice with an organization before. At first, I was highly skeptical of signing the NDA because of previous negative experiences with NDAs since most organizations use them solely to protect their own interests. However, after reading the NDA several times, I realized it was created to prioritize my best interests. I seek out professional opportunities that align with my personal values of equity, racial justice, love, and community, so this intentional element of the hiring process was an indicator that Moonshot was a place where I would want to work.
Jordan: With Moonshot the whole process moved quickly, they kept me up to date and well informed the whole time. It was also great doing tasks that were actually applicable to my job and did not require me to give away new thoughts and ideas. Also being compensated for the time was amazing. I only had two other organizations that came close to this by taking me out to a nice dinner but only before the final round.
Daranee: It was interesting to me that while I was not familiar with Moonshot edVentures before engaging in the interview process, I knew a few Fellows through my previous community-based work. A recruiter from RCG Talent reached out to me via LinkedIn to let me know about the job opportunity. I appreciated the intentional outreach because I don’t know that I would’ve necessarily come across the job posting otherwise.
In addition to targeted outreach to BIPOC candidates, organizations can also recruit from alumni associations affiliated with HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), Native American-serving Non-Tribal (NASNTI) institutions, and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander (AANAPISI)-serving institutions. Professional racial affinity and leadership groups are also a place to recruit BIPOC candidates - some of the places that come to mind for me are National Alliance of Black School Educators, Surge Institute, and Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP).
¹Zippia, “How many applications does it take to get a job?”
²Glassdoor, “How long should your interview take? We found out.”