Here at SUPERRR, we recently wrapped up recruitment for two new roles: an Events & Community Manager, and a People & Operations Manager. We were so grateful to see how many people invested time and energy to apply, and we don’t take any of that for granted!
Each time we’ve designed a recruitment process, we’ve tried to do it with our values at heart, and each time we try out new approaches to see what works. We know that application processes can be a very vulnerable situation for applicants to be in, and by hiring one person and not another we make a decision that has a direct impact on people’s lives and their access to resources. To some extent, “equitable, fair and inclusive recruitment processes in a capitalist labor market” is in itself an oxymoron, and even with the best intentions, research, and commitment, there might always remain a tension.
In this blog post, we want to open space to reflect about how we as a feminist organisation can proactively deal with this power imbalance. We wanted to share some emerging good practices that we (and the people involved in the process!) appreciated, and some areas that we think we can do better on in the future – in the hope that sharing these allows readers to skip some of our mistakes.
Preparing for recruitment
Our goal for this process was to recruit two people for two new positions at SUPERRR – an Events & Community Manager, and a People & Operations Manager – which is our first team member focused on human resources and ‘people’ related things. For both of these positions, it was important to us to find people who would be able to do most of the ‘core’ responsibilities of the role well (or show that they were open and able to learn new responsibilities!), and bring new perspectives to the team in a way that challenges us, while also being able to manage the realities of working in a small non-profit organisation. We tried to make these expectations as clear as possible in the job descriptions that we ended up publishing.
One of the most useful resources for us through this recruitment was this guide from Collaborative Future which provided incredibly thoughtful advice on the different recruitment steps. It suggests ‘workshopping the role’ with multiple people in the team – making sure that people in the team have a voice into what the position will do and what the needs in the organisation are. This time round, we didn’t do this in a formal way with a ‘role workshop’, but we did share the job descriptions with various people in the team whose roles interact most closely. We know from experience that hiring new people changes the dynamics in the organisation – so it was important to try and bring as many people in as possible.
Designing the recruitment process includes various pieces and various people:
- Writing the job ad, and turning that into a public facing ‘job description’ -> in collaboration with people whose roles intersect with the position
- Deciding what the application should include –> the core ‘owners’ of the process who have experience in recruitment
- Deciding on salary and level of responsibility -> in collaboration with people who have financial responsibility or decision making
- Deciding on the different steps of the process, and thinking about who will be involved at each step -> people in the organisation who had a good overview of how busy others were, and who might be able to make time for this
- Setting a schedule for this recruitment, so that we had clear answers for applicants who would inevitably ask: when can I expect to hear from you? – and making sure that internally, people blocked off enough time to be able to stick to the schedule.
- Preparing emails + communication texts or graphics for each step, in German and English -> in collaboration with our communications lead
- Deciding how and where to promote the post -> in collaboration with our communications lead
Some learnings from this stage include:
- Set a realistic schedule, and keep to it: When we started planning this process, we allowed for 3 weeks for applications to come in, and just one week to review. That was ambitious, as we didn’t know how many applications we would get – as it turned out, we ended up having to narrow down more than 80 applications to less than 10 for the first round interview, which involves not just reading them once but reading a few them over and over, also because we were making these decisions as a team. We managed to keep to our schedule, but in the future, it would make things less stressful to allow for more time for the ‘review’ stage.
- Salary: Be clear about what you will pay a person. They know how much money they need to make their living, and they deserve to know whether a position will pay enough before they pour their heart into an application. And with clear, we mean: numbers. There are several reasons why we don’t believe in negotiating salaries and have worked on a transparent salary structure for our team.
- Clarity, clarity, clarity: in this round of job postings we specified that one of the positions needed ‘a good command of written and spoken German and English’, and this was a must have for the position, given that we organise events both in Germany and internationally. But we didn’t make clear enough that it really was essential, and we realised too late that people can interpret this in vastly different ways. In the future, we will be more specific about what this means – not by asking for formal qualifications, but perhaps specifying language qualification equivalency (eg. B2 equivalent, or C1 equivalent.)
- Think carefully about what you actually need to know: for example, formal qualifications like academic degrees are not that important for us:. Some funders (especially German funders) beg to disagree and want us to tie salaries to academic degrees or working experience, at least for the project positions funded by them. There’s a huge amount of class privilege in going into higher education, and from our perspective, ruling out people who don’t have specific academic degrees simply means ruling out a huge section of the workforce whose lived experience and actual skills might be exactly what we’re looking for. Similarly, we specifically asked people not to include their birth date, or a photo of themselves, as we didn’t want this information to influence our decisions.
- Questions > cover letter: we also asked people to submit a cover letter in which they answered specific questions. This was because we know that the art of writing a cover letter can be very class- and access-privileged: some people will have others to help them and know how to write a ‘good’ one, and for others it might be a new activity. And actually from our perspective, what we want to know from a cover letter is simply more about the person than you can get from a CV. But again, we weren’t clear enough here, and we notice that the rules and standards of traditional application processes are deeply ingrained in a lot of applicants, which can be scary to deviate from in this kind of process. Did we want a cover letter *and* the answer to the specified questions, or just the questions within an email? Next time, we would specify very clearly: instead of a traditional cover letter, please answer these specific questions, and actively calling out that we aren’t looking for a traditional cover letter.
- Review the language used in the job description for bias: for example, in German ensuring that words are not gendered (or gendered towards the female); taking out any unnecessarily complex words or jargon; being clear in expectations.
The applications
As per Collaborative Future’s guidance, we decided to try and involve a variety of people in the team throughout the process, while ensuring there was also consistency for the person/people going through the process.
Once the applications were in, our process – with the underlying goals of respecting applicants time, creating an inclusive process where people felt as comfortable and able to be their full selves as possible; and mitigating our own biases wherever possible, was as follows:
Step 1: Reviewing applications. The ‘owner’ of the process joined in here, plus someone else whose role intersected with the new position. We prepared an evaluation spreadsheet with columns where we could pull out specific examples that they had mentioned which met the ‘must haves’ in the position; a column for ‘positive surprises’ and another for ‘remaining questions’. Two people looked at every application and filled this in for each applicant.
Step 2: First round interviews, 30 minutes, held remotely (using a calendar scheduling tool, Calendly or Cal.com, to make it easier for people to find a slot that worked for them): The same two people from Step 1 carried these out and decided collaboratively who should move to step 3. Interview questions were reviewed in advance by others in the team, too, and we had short debriefs at the end of each interview.
Step 3: Second round interviews, 1 hour in person: The ‘owner’ of the process plus two other people from the team. The in-person interviews also included the opportunity to come and meet the rest of the team and see the office. These three people debriefed at the end of each interview.
[Step 4: we planned that if needed, we might give candidates a task, compensate them for their time, and give them a specific time window in which to do it – as it turns out, we didn’t do this in the end.]
Learnings from this stage included:
- Sending interview questions in advance: this was the first time I’ve personally ever done this, and I’m a convert! This was a great decision, once again inspired by Collaborative Future’s tips on inclusive interviews. We sent interviewees the full set of interview questions 24 hours in advance (which did involve a couple of Sunday emails, because of interviews on a Monday – something to think about in the future, or to schedule!). The quality and depth of answers that we got in those interviews was so much higher than in interviews where people are forced to think on the spot, it really let us better understand different people’s approach and understanding of the issues at hand. There are relatively few positions in which ‘thinking on your feet’ is an absolute essential skill – at least in our work, people normally have time to think about their actions – so testing that felt unnecessary. Particularly for neurodivergent people or people who find the interview process particularly stressful, this really helped us make sure we were hearing their best answers. We also appreciated this explanation from Collaborative Future:
"We've found that traditional interview situations (where people have to think on their feet and aren't provided context for your questions) favour neurotypical people who are good at 'passing' interviews rather than neccessarily good at the job. It also favours those who already 'speak the language' of your organisation rather than those who can easily do the job but come from a different background."
- Providing context for questions: being clear on why we were asking certain questions – that is, what the background is, and how it might be relevant to either working at SUPERRR or for this specific position – helped guide answers in the right direction and gave us useful information (and removed the uncertainty for applicants.)
- At the beginning of the interview, checking to see if there’s any adjustments the candidate needed to feel comfortable: making sure that they had the space to express their needs so they would be able to show up in the way they wanted for the interview.
Making a decision, and closing the loop
Through this process, we were able to find wonderful finalist candidates for each position – though it was a hard decision at the end! We made sure to get in contact with every person who had applied, to thank them for their time and provide transparency on the status of their application.
We’re grateful for other feminist organisations insights on their recruitment process, for example Hera Hussain who shared in detail how her organisation CHAYN hired a movement builder, and this recruitment process shared via RadHR.
We’d love to hear of any other tips that you’ve used to make your recruitment processes equitable, fair and inclusive – drop us a line on hello@superrr.org!