Operationalizing values: The hiring process
Through our research, we uncover the ways technology exacerbates inequities. As an organization, we don’t want to treat equity as a stand-alone goal, but as something we are striving for in everything we do, even in our operations. For hiring, this has meant re-imagining our process and what the Center truly needs in a staff member for them to be successful.
What we’ve discovered is that changing long-standing customs around hiring is hard because some of them are so deeply ingrained into how we have come to expect the process to work. It raised questions for us about why we think about hiring in certain ways, and allowed us to creatively restructure in a way that better reflects our values.
We started small and continue to make adjustments along the way. This post covers some of the lessons learned, from job descriptions, to evaluation, to even paying candidates as part of the process.
About us
As we thought about the kinds of applicants we wanted to attract, it quickly became clear that we needed to do a better job of communicating the kind of inclusive, equitable place we are trying to build and what we stand for. Our mission, reworked in 2019, expressly says we tackle the inequitable impacts of being watched, and is now prominent on our website and our job descriptions.
When people see the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law is hiring, do they think that they need a degree in computer science to work with us? We hope not. Or a law degree? Even though we are at a law school, our staff have a wide range of academic backgrounds. What about lived experience being surveilled? That’s definitely something we value! How about a deep commitment to civil rights, social justice, and racial justice? Those are things we can’t do without! We think our mission helps communicate that.
Job description and advertising
Besides communicating more clearly about who we are, we wanted to be more precise in our own thinking about what skills are needed to do the work. Do we really need X years of experience or a bullet list of skills that sounds helpful but aren’t actually part of the job? At a Management Center training, the instructor emphasized that you want your job description to be an open door, not a gate that keeps candidates out. For example, we used to say that X years experience in policy or research was required, and now we ask for interest in technology, policy, or civil rights, as we often can teach the policy and research skills.
We’ve also reworked our job descriptions to be more conversational and welcoming. Leave out the technobabble and the academic chest puffing. One thing we work hard at in our research and advocacy is taking the mystique out of technology and looking at the real-world implications surveillance technologies have on people’s lives. Job descriptions should do the same. We clearly list out the specific tasks the job entails and let tone of the description be less formal and stiff.
To reach the candidates who might not have thought about tech policy work, working at a university, or realized the intersection of tech and civil rights, we built a spreadsheet of a broader range of outlets to advertise to including, but not limited to, our peer organizations. The list keeps growing and we now find people in our candidate pool who had never heard of us outside of the job posting, but who are interested in civil rights. Have a tip on where we should advertise for our next opening? Email me!
Salary
Compensation is always the conversation no one wants to bring up. You spend time applying, interviewing, and congratulations — you are the top candidate! It is only at the very end, after an offer is on the table, that the salary is usually unveiled. Which, in many cases, if it had been known at the beginning, could have saved everyone some time and stress. Providing that information as soon as possible sets expectations clearly from the beginning. Due to Georgetown policies, we cannot list the salary publicly on the posting, but we do notify candidates who advance early in the process what it is by email.
Evaluation
After an initial review of candidates’ resume and cover letters, we invite several candidates to complete a short assignment of the kind they would likely have to execute in the job for which they have applied. Some examples of tasks we have set include writing an email to a congressional staffer, editing a student’s research memo, and reworking a document for an advocacy audience.
We evaluate the exercises blindly, to mitigate bias we may have towards any particular candidates. We can’t always know what our own biases are and the blind evaluation helps us keep an open mind to candidates who might not have the “traditional” experience, but who have the skills to do the job, or outstanding potential to get there with a little extra support..
In our hiring process for a recent director-level position, we were able to actually pay candidates who did the exercises for their time and ideas. Moving forward, we hope to implement this across all our positions. It takes time and intellectual effort to complete these exercises, not to mention the time you may have to take off from your current job to do an interview. We believe it is the right thing to provide compensation for this.
At the interview stage, we try to provide candidates with the list of questions we may ask them in advance. At our workplace, it is rare that you are surprised with a question you won’t have been prepared for and so we felt that should be true for an interview as well. Finally, if possible, we give honest and substantive feedback to candidates who are not selected.
Guides and resources
Of course we didn’t think up all these ideas on our own! I had conversations with some of our peer organizations to see what they were doing, what worked for them, and what didn’t. (Shout out to Upturn, AI Now Institute, and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality for taking the time to chat with me!) We are constantly learning as an organization through readings, staff surveys, exit interviews, and honest, occasionally uncomfortable discussions. All managerial staff have attended a Management Center training which provided tools on how to structure the hiring process in an equitable way.
Last June, the Center published A Seat at the Table: Creating Inclusive Tech Policy Organizations written by Gabrielle Rejouis and Alisa Valentin. Prompted by internal and external conversations, it was another step in our quest to make changes in our own hiring practices.
If you are interested in working with us, our opportunities are always posted on our website.
Katie Evans is the Director of Communications & Operations at the Center. You can follow her on Twitter at @mskatieevans.
