What is something I can change in my everyday normal white life to make a difference for black people
Toy Box, 3rd Edition
Hello and welcome to ToyBox - a blog that unpacks systemic racism and the workplace. We’re three editions in and we have 56 Toy Box members, up from 47 last week. Thank you so much for your support and shares! If you know someone who wants to learn more about systemic racism in the workplace, send them an invite:
Discrimination in hiring
Humans are not very good at objectively evaluating candidates and often let biases like similarity attraction bias drive them towards candidates that match their background (and race). Hiring systems aren’t great either - referrals reinforce systemic racism, unstructured interviews favor white male candidates, and generic job descriptions filled with “nice to have” qualifications and biased language prevent POC from applying. To learn more, check out the “Unpacked” section below.
You ask, we answer
Question: What is something I can change in my everyday normal white life to make a difference for black people, even if I didn't realize it made any difference at all?
Answer: You might think it goes without saying, but when you hear something that you think is racist, call it out. Whether it’s your parents, your close friends, or your work spouses, you are probably the person best positioned to discuss issues of race. You don’t have to attack them - you can instead encourage them to unpack their statement. Try asking “what do you mean by that?” and approach the conversation as if you’re both trying to learn from the experience. If you’re looking for a book on how to do this, check out So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.
How to be an ally at work this week
Practice making space and amplifying the voices of the people of color at your company. Today, find one moment to give your voice to someone else during a meeting.
Educational resources
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
Harvard Business Review: How to Reduce Personal Bias When Hiring
We are our best hope
The Hiring Toy Box
The job market is inequitable
We are living in an unprecedented job market, in which more than 40 million people filed for unemployment in the past 3 months. The unemployment rate sits above 11% and none of us are sure when this pandemic recession is going to end. Making matters worse, Black Americans are suffering disproportionately, with an unemployment rate of 17%.
Black Americans have long since been denied equal economic opportunity. This has resulted in a lack of representation that permeates all industries, even more recently developed tech industries. And while there are a whole host of underlying factors contributing to this that merit their own discussion, this week we will focus on the hiring process.
Setting the Toy Box scene
As we discussed in the first edition, any system of distribution that ends up with White people getting the majority of the items is a White supremacist system. Whether or not it was designed to be so is always up for debate, but the effects on non-White populations are real regardless. The concept of modern hiring can be seen as its own Toy Box distribution.
There are 4 important elements involved in this Toy Box distribution:
The toy distributor (hiring manager)
The toys in the box (job roles)
The children trying to get the toys (job applicants)
The distribution method (hiring process)
So let's pretend that you're the hiring manager. Your company just raised a Series B and you've been tasked with building out a team of 5. So you've got a box of 5 toys (jobs) and you're trying to figure out a system to distribute them to a group of job applicants on the market. And lucky (or unlucky) for you, your company doesn't have a fully standardized hiring process, so you get to build it yourself.
But finding great talent is difficult and time consuming. Plus - you need good people to start ASAP, so you try to find some effective shortcuts. But you know that bad hires can be expensive and make you look bad, so you need to feel 100% confident in the workers you choose.
Defining the role
You check out other similar companies and their job descriptions and put together your own JDs based on a mix of the qualifications and skillsets you've seen on the market.
Sourcing candidates
You reach out to your friends and family members about the job roles and ask them to recommend anyone they can find. You blast some emails to your alumni network. After a couple of days, you realize that your inbound referrals might take a while, so you post on job boards - LinkedIn, Angelist, Ziprecruiter, and Indeed.
Vetting candidates
Your inbox is blowing up! There must be close to 250 applicants interested in each job role. Now you have to figure out how to get through them all. You decide that any referrals from your networks are guaranteed an interview. For the job board applicants, you don't have a resume screening algorithm, so you go through each of them yourself, quickly screening out 90% of applicants who don't look to be a "good fit." You're not looking at race - you're just looking for talent.
Interviewing candidates
You invite about 10 candidates per role to schedule an interview. You've decided that your process will have 1 interview with you, 1 interview with the leadership team, a take-home exercise, and a final interview with you. These interviews don't have a rigid structure - you ask them about their background and experiences and try to sense if they'd be a good "culture fit."
Closing the deal
You give out 5 offers and get 5 accepts! This is fantastic. You get started figuring out how to onboard them and that's when you realize - they're all White. 2 of them are women, but none are people of color. The White kids got all the toys. How did this happen?
The ToyBox Checklist
1) We confirm that the White kids are in fact getting most of the toys
You look and it's pretty easy to tell that everyone you hired is White. Confirmed.
2) We figure out how the White kids are getting more toys than others. Is it the trivia question? Is it where we're throwing the toys?
Let’s take a look at the process you put together:
JD-ing
You heavily based your JD on existing JDs in the market. As a result, you included framing and terms which inadvertently discriminate against women and POC. You also put a high threshold for minimum experience that women and POC are more likely to be scared away by. You also suggested that applicants should come from top-tier consulting firms or investment banks, which have notoriously low representation of Black people and other POC.
Sourcing
Like most hiring managers, you relied heavily on referrals. However, since 75% of White Americans core social networks are also White, all your inbound referrals happened to be White people.
Vetting
Although it felt natural, giving special treatment to referral candidates meant giving special treatment to a subset of overwhelmingly White candidates.
When screening resumes, you looked out for traditional markers of a good candidate: an elite school, big name company, and interesting hobbies. Unfortunately, elite schools struggle with their own diversity problems, so using that marker eliminated large swaths of talented applicants of color. Big name companies tend to recruit from elite schools and also feature their own discriminatory hiring practices, so adding that filter further exacerbated the problem. Even worse, in screening for interesting hobbies, your unconscious bias led you to naturally gravitate towards candidates that grew up with similar experiences. Even just seeing the candidate's name triggered a subtle unconscious impulse to weed out candidates of color.
Interviewing
By not instituting a rigid interview structure or explicit objective evaluation criteria, you gave a natural advantage to the candidates that felt most comfortable talking to you. Because of similarity bias, the candidates that felt most comfortable were the White candidates. Since the candidates of color grew up with different life experiences, it was difficult for you to connect with them.
You prioritized culture fit in the late stages of the interview process. Since company culture is heavily shaped by the people currently at the company and your company is predominantly White, you were subconsciously looking out for candidates that were "White culture fit." Some candidates of color are familiar with White culture and managed to pass the test, but most did not.
3) We get rid of the white supremacist toy distribution system
You tell your leadership team that you want to build a better, more equitable hiring process.
4) We design a toy distribution system that evenly distributes toys to everyone
How would you go about creating a hiring process that's more fair? Let us know and we'll feature your ideas in next week's edition.
5) We check the output to make sure our new system results in each kid getting an equal amount of toys
Beyond better racial demographics, how would you know that your process is getting increasingly more equitable? Let us know below or respond to this email and we'll feature your ideas in next week's edition.
See you next week!
Next week, we will talk about what fair & equitable hiring could look like, using current companies as examples so you can figure out what works for your company.
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