Unconscious bias can affect all stages of an employer’s hiring process, from initial resume review to the final decision. That’s as much the case at nonprofits as it is in the business world.
One well-known 2004 study showed, for instance, that job applicants with “African-American-sounding” names were less likely to be called in for interviews than those with “white-sounding” names, and the gap spanned all kinds of industries. Other research suggests that people start to apply stereotypes quickly upon meeting people they perceive as outsiders.
Even people with good intentions might fall into the trap of hiring people who are most like them.
If an organization does not evaluate whether its hiring process is fair to everyone, people of color and other minorities may never get a fair shot to work for it. But, as experts in nonprofit hiring and recruitment tell The Chronicle, organizations can take steps to reduce bias in their hiring practices.
Take care when setting the minimum qualifications for positions. When developing a job description, think carefully about which skills a person actually needs to be successful. Sometimes the skills and experience required for jobs make it more likely that affluent — and mostly white — people will qualify. Sometimes, the requirements are simply proxies for desired traits.
“Often what [nonprofits] say they need as selection criteria doesn’t actually tie to the job,” says Monisha Kapila, chief executive of ProInspire, an organization that develops nonprofit leaders.
For instance, many entry-level nonprofit jobs require a lot of volunteer experience. But many low-income and minority college graduates work paid jobs while in school, reducing the likelihood that they’ll spend a lot of time volunteering. When these recent graduates compete for jobs at nonprofits, the lack of volunteer experience can put them at a disadvantage, Ms. Kapila says.
Instead of focusing on volunteer experience, she says, nonprofits might weigh relevant work experience more heavily.
Ensure that recruitment goes beyond insider recommendations. In surveys, many nonprofits report that they favor recommendations from staff over other recruitment strategies. However, if your employees are mostly white, they may be more likely to have, and therefore endorse, mostly white friends or professional acquaintances, says Allison Brown, a consultant at Community Wealth Partners, a company that helps nonprofits create strategies to carry out their missions.
A 2014 survey found that 75 percent of white Americans have no minorities in their social networks with whom they discuss important matters, notes Ms. Brown, who has reviewed outside research on implicit bias on behalf of her firm, in part to develop practices to eliminate any bias in its hiring process. That suggests that leaving recruitment purely to endorsements from colleagues will limit who gets their foot in the door, she says.
Reach out to minority communities. Broaden your recruitment tactics to attract people of color and other underrepresented groups, Ms. Brown advises. That could mean circulating a job announcement to an email list or website with significant minority membership or readership, or staffing a table at a convention for an association or group that serves people of color.
“When we’ve talked to organizations that have really representative teams, what they tell us is that they’re actively building relationships with communities of color, individuals of color, before the job even opens up,” Ms. Brown says.
To address a relative dearth of people of color applying for jobs, her firm is taking steps to build deeper relationships with organizations and alumni groups that serve people of color, she says. Community Wealth Partners also posts employment opportunities on job boards for graduates of Howard University, a historically black institution in the company’s hometown of Washington, D.C.
It’s equally important for people in leadership roles to expand their personal and professional circles, says Birgit Burton, founder of African American Development Officers, an organization that provides mentoring and networking opportunities for black fundraisers. “Be careful not to stay in your comfort zone” when networking, as tempting as it may be, she advises. Some members of her association are white, she notes, and they joined because they want to meet peers of color.
Don’t let someone’s race affect your resume-review process. Block out names and don’t look at photos of candidates at this early stage. That way you’re less likely to identify a person’s race or gender. Ms. Brown says her firm started this practice two years ago and is seeing more candidates of color make it past the resume-review stage.
Community Wealth Partners has also built standardized metrics for scoring candidates that focus on skills rather than on things that might disqualify people of color, like what college they attended.
“We’re really looking at someone’s experience in a more objective way,” Ms. Brown says.
Her company has added a few more people of color to its staff since its implemented new hiring practices, she notes. Currently, seven employees identify as people of color while 16 are white.
Have standard interview questions.
It may seem extreme, but try not to have interviews be too informal and conversational, Ms. Brown advises. Implicit bias can enter into interviews when a hiring manager acts warmly toward candidates they unconsciously prefer, possibly offering “second chances” on questions or allowing perceived similarities with the candidate to affect their judgment.
“You might be less likely to do that if you’re talking to someone who has a really different background to you, or that you subconsciously don’t relate to as much, because you don’t see yourself in them,” she says. That’s less likely to occur if an interviewer sticks to a script.
Interviewers at Ms. Brown’s firm try to stick to the same questions for each candidate throughout the talking stages, from initial phone screens to more in-depth interviews. It’s not easy to break the habit of conversing more informally, she says, but she believes it’s led to a process that is more fair.
Set criteria for final recommendations. Whether several people confer on a hiring decision or one person makes the call, it helps to have a standard scoring system for candidates that is as free from subjectivity as possible.
Ms. Kapila, of ProInspire, says her organization has a “selection rubric” that spells out in detail what interviewers are going to assess, such as whether someone applying for a program-manager job appears to have good interpersonal skills.
Keep evaluating whether biases exist.
At each stage in the process, from the initial job posting through interviews and the final recommendation, evaluate whether candidates of color or other minorities are being weeded out. “Then you can really focus on, Why is that happening?” Ms. Brown says.
