Values-Focused Hiring in Practice
As Director of Search Operations & Community at TOCG, my aim, along with the rest of the team, is to make a meaningful and positive impact on the arts and culture sector. At TOCG, we do this by delivering robust applicant pools comprised of candidates from diverse backgrounds to our executive search clients and supporting candidates through the process by ensuring they have enough information to see themselves in the role and consider applying.
From this unique vantage point on the candidate search and hiring process, here are a few suggestions to significantly impact your hiring processes while we move into the next phase of the pandemic. As we reevaluate, rebuild, and reinforce our teams, enshrining the lessons of the past 20 months in our processes will help us ensure our continued responsiveness to the moment.
Transparency Around Paths Toward Equity & Inclusion
In the wake of 2020, systematically marginalized voices of our society are asking arts and cultural organizations to hold themselves to a higher standard, especially with diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and anti-racism (DEIAA). Considering that our current state of affairs took systematic effort over a prolonged period, course correction will demand the same before positive outcomes emerge at a large scale.
With this in mind, an essential step on the path to course correction is ensuring that your search and hiring process reflects the values that your organization aspires toward. Your team may already be in the process of leveraging different strategies to advance a culture of inclusion and equity. What I have noticed is that the organizations that attract and secure qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds are forthcoming about where they are in that process of becoming more inclusive. This is not about overly apologizing for being a predominantly White institution; it’s about being transparent about that fact and articulating the path forward so that the candidate understands what to expect.
This can start with the inclusivity statement in the job profile, considering it’s often the first place a candidate is learning about an organization. This can be enough of an indicator of your organization’s thinking to stoke interest. During the interview process, it’s important to be prepared to answer questions about your organization’s DEIAA related goals, investments, and aspirations.
While the direct question may go unasked, candidates are likely considering the question, “would I be the first person of color in leadership at this organization?” If this would be true in the case of this hire, consider how you might outline the team’s journey in self-reflection and reckoning with this fact. Essential questions to reflect on are:
Can you describe why increasing the cultural diversity of your leadership is critical to the future success of the organization?
How does your organization plan to support leaders of color transitioning from different industries with professional development opportunities?
How is your organization managing things like implicit bias and microaggressions?
Are you looking to this potential hire for guidance on DEIAA efforts? Is this in the job description or an assumption?
Do you clearly understand how your personnel of color honestly feel about the organization’s culture?
Is there a hiring plan in place or in progress to consider increasing diversity at all levels across the organization?
If the only people of color at your organization are in junior or service-oriented roles, where is leadership in the process of growing these individuals?
Your answers to these and similar questions will clarify where you are in the process of responding to structural inequality in a meaningful way. If you are not confident in your ability to answer these questions, your team may need to take the time to reflect on these things further before prioritizing the hiring of leaders from diverse backgrounds. If that is not an option, providing your candidates with an honest picture of the organization they are joining is imperative for retention. On the other hand, if you feel confident about your answers to these questions, initiating the conversation around these topics can be productive in taking some pressure off the candidate and establishing your organization’s readiness and commitment to your values.
Salary Disclosure
Our cultural moment also asks organizations to be more transparent with salaries and include them in job descriptions. This is a practice that we agree with and advocate for, primarily because time is the most valuable asset we have. The effect of encouraging people to apply despite fiscal uncertainty is that only those privileged enough to prioritize work satisfaction over financial gains are likely to apply or those who will subject themselves to wage theft for professional fulfillment. To only disclose the salary for the role after leading candidates through multiple interviews over several weeks is a monumental waste of time for the candidate and for the organization if the salary isn’t sustainable for your finalist.
Many organizations have readily adopted the practice of publishing the salary, but others hesitate, often because of a lack of salary transparency in the organization’s culture. Others may need to publish the opportunity to align with organizational protocols and logistics before setting and approving the budget for the position. I want to believe that arts organizations would not intentionally leverage the prestige of working for their organization to coerce competent candidates into roles for suboptimal compensation. Still, it remains a plausible reason for not publishing the salary.
With this in mind, it’s vital that, as a hiring manager, you have a grasp of where your organization lands in this spectrum. If your organization has a culture of transparency around salary, then you shouldn’t hesitate to publish it in the job description. If your organization is working towards transparency, or for other reasons, is not comfortable publishing just yet, consider adding a statement to the listing such as “compensation details will be disclosed upon inquiry, or during the initial interview.” This statement shows that the information is available under a specific context, but publishing it at the time of posting was not an option. It would be better to have a candidate not apply or withdraw because the compensation isn’t a fit than to waste everyone’s time proceeding with interviews.
If your organization expects you as the hiring manager to find and hire the best candidate, at the lowest wage, by withholding the salary information until the end of the process and coercing them into taking the role, then you unfortunately have more work to do than we can address in the confines of this article.
Conveying Remote-Work Policies
As our organizations weigh the benefits of returning to the office against the value of retaining some aspects of the work-from-home model, we must clearly communicate our policies as they are at the time of posting. The pandemic has allowed many of us to reflect on our priorities. As a result, countless job seekers are looking to retain the flexibility that remote work has offered.
Sharing your organization’s remote work status in the job listing is imperative, even if it’s undefined or still in progress. If your organization has mandated COVID vaccinations for all staff and plans to return to work in-person full time, this must be disclosed in the job description. If your role has the option to be fully or partially remote, this needs to be in the description, as it can widen your applicant pool significantly. Assuming that people will apply regardless of specificity around remote work will fill up your inbox with prospective candidates asking for clarity around the same question. And at worst, candidates whose comfortability aligns with your policy may choose not to apply because of the uncertainty.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer regarding remote work for every role, let alone every organization. Developing the right policy for your organization will likely be a lengthy process. But regardless of where you are in it, the current policy should be clear for your candidates as early on as possible.
In Conclusion
As our industry works towards incorporating these values into the hiring process, I can’t help but reflect on the pressure and anxiety so many organizations feel about putting these measures into practice. So many fear publicly “screwing up” along the way or angering vested stakeholders whose contradictory viewpoints hold an organization back from progress. There’s no doubt that all of the above recommendations are easier said than done. So I genuinely empathize because navigating this would not be easy in the best of times, let alone during a global pandemic.
However, it’s necessary to understand that the external cultural pressure is the product of these changes being more than a century overdue. Our country’s alleged arbiters of progress sold us a narrative of incremental change, which has left so many would-be arts leaders from all walks of life excluded. I cannot begin to fathom how many promising performing arts college graduates we’ve lost to more accessible industries because student loan repayment took priority over passion. How many brilliant strategists have the arts lost because we could not offer the flexibility to allow people to attend to the needs of their families? And how many young people never even considered pursuing the arts in any capacity because they’d never seen anyone like them do it before?
If what we desire is an equitable culture inside and outside of our institutions, we cannot afford to lose the perspectives of the people of the global majority nor the experiences of those who could not purchase access with their privilege. It is not about radical change overnight, as wonderful as that would be for many. It’s about significant steps, bravely taken, in a timely fashion.
Jordan Sanford is the Director of Search Operations & Community at Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. TOCG is a New York City-based arts consultancy offering strategy, assessment, executive search, and leadership coaching services to organizations across the US—all with a focus on audiences and revenue outcomes. For over a decade, Jordan has dedicated his efforts to helping emerging creative professionals forge successful careers, with a special emphasis on supporting youth of color. Jordan developed and coordinated college and career pathway programs to serve systematically marginalized youth through senior management roles at The Art Effect and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
