Diversifying Your Team: Strategies for Hiring

Does your organization know how to reach a diverse audience when hiring for new positions? Join us to learn about how to keep bias out of the interview process. 

Learning Objectives

• Understand how to recruit for a more diverse staff.
• Learn how to interview job candidates and assess skills in a way that avoids bias.

Description

This will be an interactive session with time for Q&A throughout. The session will be broken into the following main areas:

Recruiting for diversity:

• Self-assessment of organization websites and outward-facing materials. How does your organization represent itself to the public? Is the face of your organization diverse?
   
• Job description workshop. Unconscious bias often sneaks into our job descriptions. This section will go over tools to help avoid biased job descriptions, and include a workshop with peers to review sample job descriptions.
   
• Where to post jobs to reach a diverse audience.

Hiring with an eye on diversity:

• Resume reviews and blind applications. This section will review new ideas in how to avoid bias in the application and resume review process.
   
• The importance of creating standard interview questions. How having a script helps avoid biased interviewing.
   
• What impressions are you giving candidates during the interview process? Who’s on the hiring team? Are you presenting a diverse set of interviewers, or giving the impression new staff might be tokens of diversity? If your staff currently lacks diversity, how to address the issue in interviews.

Level

Introductory

CFRE Credits

Participants can receive 3 CFRE credits for this training. Participants must ask for a CFRE certificate when they check-in on the day of the training. 

Audience

Nonprofit staff with a role in recruiting or hiring. Leaders, managers, people in HR, and those who want to build a more diverse team.

Presenter

Brooke Hunter is an expert in nonprofit leadership, with a focus on increasing diversity in the workplace. Brooke has been working in nonprofit leadership, technology policy, and the arts for over twenty years. She brings her experience as a fundraiser, Executive Director, Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, business advisor and project manager to her consulting practice. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BFA from Loyola University New Orleans.

Guiding Practices for Nonprofits

• Nonprofits should articulate their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and leverage these principles for strategic mission fulfillment.
   
• Nonprofits should create a strategy for fostering relationships with diverse networks in order to broaden the pool of qualified candidates for employment, Board membership and other volunteer roles, and commit to doing so prior to making hiring or volunteer nomination decisions.
   
• Nonprofits should create a strategy for breaking into diverse networks in order to broaden the pool of qualified candidates, and commit to doing so prior to making hiring decisions.
   
• Nonprofits should consider lived experience, involvement with services, and professional and technical competencies, in addition to educational experience, when recruiting new employees, Board members and other volunteers.
   
• Nonprofits must ensure that they understand and comply with all federal, state and local employment laws during recruitment, hiring, retention, promotion, reassignment and dismissal of employees.
  • Under federal law, the following types of discrimination are prohibited: age, disability, equal pay/compensation, genetic information, harassment, national origin, pregnancy, race/color, religion, retaliation, sex and sexual harassment.
     
• Nonprofits must not make pre-employment inquiries related to race, height, weight, financial information, unemployment status, background checks, religious affiliation or beliefs, citizenship, marital status, number of children, sex/gender, disability or medical questions and examinations.
  • Under federal law, employers are explicitly prohibited from screening prospective employees for disabilities or requiring medical examinations in advance of a job offer. Nonprofits may ask if an accommodation is necessary to perform a specific job duty, and if the answer is yes, then the nonprofit may ask what the accommodation would be.

The Guide is available as a free digital download at CNPENM.org/Guide. Hard copies of the Guide and Companion Workbook will be available for purchase at this training for $25 each with a credit card or check.

The Center for Nonprofit Excellence often takes photos during our trainings to share on social media. If you prefer not to be photographed, please let us know in the Special Needs field when you register.