5 ways to diversify your hiring pipeline for startups

A few months back, I put the last period at the end of my hiring project plan and felt content. I had set out to completely redesign the way we hire and felt confident I’d built a better mousetrap. In my mind, the 20 pages of tactics, process flow charts, interview questions, promotions plan and email outreach strategy were air tight. I’d researched best practices in hiring from some of the most well-known companies and thought leaders. I felt secure that the process would yield top candidates for the role. And to some extent I was right! We had some stellar candidates in our pipeline. Still — my meticulous plan fell seriously short. 

At Leanlab, we work hard to build a culture of trust. That means, when you need to be held accountable, there’s a team member at the ready to push your work to the next level and you can be confident that they have your best interest at heart. That’s why I’m grateful to my team for pushing me to more proactively design a hiring system to yield a diverse applicant pool even though the process to fix it was a little uncomfortable for me. To design a hiring system that is anti-racist — that is, one that proactively seeks to change systems and organizational structures so that power can be redistributed and shared equitably — I needed to confront and acknowledge my own bias, and then revisit the plan through an equity lens. 

It’s difficult to go back to a project that you’ve poured your heart into and admit that the original plan was lacking. It can be hard not to take feedback personally and it can be especially uncomfortable to confront your privilege. But feeling some sense of discomfort is the least anyone with a position of privilege can do for the sake of being a part of the solution to upend oppressive systems. So, with the support of my team, we set out to improve the original plan.

Here are five tactics you can put in place right now to improve your own hiring plan.

1 — Take ownership of your bias.

Who’s in charge of overseeing the hiring process for your organization? Chances are, she looks a lot like me. A 2018 Workplace Diversity Report revealed that 67 percent of HR professionals are women, and of those, nearly two-thirds of them are white. 

As a white woman, working for a non-profit dedicated to fighting for the ability for all children to have equitable access to a quality education, I often find myself reflecting on my lived experiences, my privilege, and the opportunities I unknowingly benefit from every day. But even in my workplace, it can still be easy for me to detach myself from my affluent white peers and lump myself in with the “woke” group of people out there making a difference. Even those of us who have dedicated our careers to giving back by working for mission-driven and/or philanthropic organizations, can not get complacent about our biases. (There’s a great article called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh,” that my CEO shared with me, that especially helped me think through this.) 

We all have bias. It will unwittingly influence the way we write job descriptions, the way we screen applications and the channels through which we push out information. For example, one explicit aspect of my proposed plan, which my team called attention to — was that the main places we were posting information about available roles on our team were white dominant, and the main influencers we were reaching out to were white. Which meant, their networks would probably look similar. 

Review your own distribution channels and ask yourself — what type of candidate are these channels most likely to yield? How might my bias and my lived experience, slant or distort the process?

2 — Track your pipeline 

Any good strategic planning process begins with grounding data. It’s impossible to design for change without first understanding where you are. Put systems in place to track and understand both the diversity of 1) your current team and 2) the applicant pool. 

Of course it’s not as simple as adding a “race” box to the end of your application — please don’t do that — so I recommend consulting your attorney on your process. We found that including a separate optional survey for applicants to complete, where the back-end data would be anonymous and disassociated from the applicant information was the best way for us to identify gaps in our pipeline and remain compliant. 

3 — Make hiring a team effort and get feedback

You need your whole team to take ownership and buy in to the process. Like most of the major goals of our organization, we cannot achieve them as individuals. I was silly to think that my team could swoop in at the end (by participating in group interviews) and still have a meaningful relationship with and influence over our hiring process. By design, about 85 percent of applicants would have already been passed over at that point. I needed to work harder to engage my team at the beginning of the planning process. At LEANLAB, we have a very diverse team. By leveraging each of my team members, I can broaden our reach to a diverse set of networks to drive variety in our application pool. I received powerful feedback from our team and colleagues that made me question, and retool our approach.

4 — Set a measurable goal

Once you’ve got your team on board, share your findings from your current demographics research and work together to set diversity goals that you all buy into. 

  • What does a diverse applicant pipeline look like?

  • When can we all agree that we can shut the doors to applications and move forward with the next phase of the process?

  • What does a “diverse” team look like?

  • Bonus: If you’re a non-profit like us, I challenge you to reference the communities you serve and compare that with the demographics of your team. Are they aligned? How can you improve?

Look beyond just race and consider other factors. Are you all around the same age? (Anecdotally, I see this is often the case in the startup sector.) Are you all non-disabled? What kind of colleges did you attend? Did you all go to college? After assessing where you are, you can probably easily identify some gaps on your team. Use those gaps to set a team diversity goal, and hold each-other accountable for driving towards it by pushing for an applicant pool where those populations are represented. 

5 — Put some strategy (and money) behind your outreach 

Unfortunately, not all workplace teams are as diverse as mine. And even with our diversity and through leveraging our personal networks, we are not always able to achieve the diversity we’d like to see in our pipelines. That means, we need to go outside of who we know, and our usual channels (for us, idealist, Nonprofit Connect, Startland News, Linkedin) and look for non-traditional networks to fill specific gaps on our team. Our search yielded organizations that specifically promote PhD positions to people of color and entire organizations dedicated to job applicants from the disability community. We identified leaders representing organizations that support protected classes of people and asked them to reach out to their networks and promote our available positions. I found in most cases that they were willing to do this at no cost to us. 

We also put some money behind it. Rather than “recreating the wheel,” we looked to some of our peer organizations and replicated their referral bonus programs with the goal of reaching potential applicants that we wouldn’t have traditionally found through our own networks. Individuals who refer candidates that are eventually hired for a position, receive $500 after the first 90 days of employment of the candidate. 

It’s not easy to confront where you’ve fallen short. Especially when it means addressing your own bias and privilege. But by taking some additional steps you too can put systems into place and we can work together to begin to right-size some of the endemic, problematic systems and structures that underlie our workplace communities. I’m grateful to my team, especially my CEO, Katie Boody, for the push and look forward to revisiting many of our systems and structures to build a more inclusive team and culture.

What Art School Taught Me about the Lean Startup

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NAME

Naomi O’Donnell

ROLE

Operations & Communications Coordinator

BIO

Naomi brings a passion for creative problem solving and transparent operational systems to her work at LEANLAB. She has worked extensively in higher education administration, at the University of Missouri Kansas City and Indiana University Bloomington, and as an event coordinator with Overflow Companies. Naomi holds a B.F.A from the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Outside of supporting educational equity as an operations & communicators coordinator, Naomi is an advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights and the local arts community.

WHY I GRAVITATE TOWARDS THIS WORK…

The creative process is a circular exercise of being open to refining your skillset, making a product, presenting it to your audience and incorporating relevant feedback. I learned the value of this type of adaptive problem solving through my fine arts education, and I believe it is essential to our process at LEANLAB Education.

In 2007, I left the small town of Bloomington, Indiana to attend The Kansas City Art Institute. My arts education took me from Missouri to Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, North Carolina and finally back again, but the common thread of all these programs was inquiry-based learning. I was encouraged by scores of teachers and peers to reject the idea of a “right” answer, in favor of nuanced responses to generalized prompts. This practice encouraged us to explore materials and share our ideas freely. Good work embodied a mastery of material, clarity of intention and originality of execution. It was separate from the obligations of implicit or prescribed standards. I fondly recall a foundations professor at KCAI who tasked our freshman class with painting a representation of our first week on campus. The subtext of this lesson drew on our ability to express the subjective through an objective piece. The assignment resulted in animated conversations that bounced from brush strokes to deep-seated anxieties. The ultimate takeaway, we discovered, was that empathy arises when we see the true colors of others, consider their perspective, and take time to engage. 

I see both this generative, adaptable approach to learning and an emphasis on engaging and connecting with others in LEANLAB Education’s mission of supporting innovators and the Kansas City Community. The experimental, measurable values embodied by LEANLAB’s Pilot Research Program echo the creative processes I employed in my arts education. LEANLAB recognizes that the use and trajectory of any product must be shaped by its end user. We foster strong educational solutions that are the result of countless prototypes, strategic discussions, public showings, and revisions. Educators deserve the option to choose from contemporary solutions that have been proven effective. In short, we know that strong educational tools, like works of art, are not made in a vacuum.

LEANLAB Education Announces Innovation Research Program for Kansas City Schools Amid COVID-19

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Schools can apply to participate and receive grants up to $25,000

August 18, 2020 | Kansas City, MO --  Kansas City based non-profit LEANLAB Education announced that it will resume its innovation research program for schools despite uncertainty around the new school year.  Schools will apply to receive up to $25,000 each in grant funding to complete a nine-month innovation and pilot process. Selected partner schools will work with LEANLAB’s research team and vetted education entrepreneurs to better understand the effectiveness of technologies, tools or services and to share lessons learned with other school communities.

 “We’ve seen remarkable ingenuity and innovation from schools this past year,” said Katie Boody, LEANLAB Education CEO. “There’s never been a time in history where schools have been faced with the need to innovate so swiftly and at such a broad scale as they have in the past six months. Now is an ideal time to conduct research and prioritize truly understanding what works -- and in what conditions -- in partnership with students, teachers, and parents.”

To support the program, LEANLAB will leverage $2 million in grants awarded from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, to expand its growing network of innovative schools across Kansas City and its unique community-led approach to developing new classroom innovations over the next three years. LEANLAB will work with these pilot schools over the 2020-21 school year to define their biggest problem in need of innovations, match them with an emerging innovator, and study the impact of the solution under the guidance of LEANLAB’s research team.

“What makes this process different from the status quo is our community-driven approach,” said Boody. “Innovation and research often feel like they are either being “done-to” communities or happening in a silo, far removed from the communities they serve. We believe that when students, parents, and teachers are empowered to lead the innovation process in real school settings, we will achieve breakthroughs in the field of education faster.”  

 This unique approach is what garnered LEANLAB attention from prominent national funders CZI and Gates Foundation. Prior to awarding LEANLAB significant funding to be dispersed across multiple years, each supported previous versions of LEANLAB’s community-driven research model with initial grants. 

 “Every child should enter adulthood with the knowledge, skills, habits, and agency they need to realize their full potential. We believe that applying what we know from the fields of learning science and human development to education is the most promising way to achieve this vision. In service of this vision, we collaborate with students, educators, and families to create educational tools and experiences that effectively meet the holistic needs of every child,” writes Sandra Liu Huang, head of education and vice president of product for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

LEANLAB’s pilot school network evolved from partnering entrepreneurs directly with classroom teachers in previous programming. In 2019, LEANLAB facilitated eight education technology pilots in nine school systems. Solutions piloted ranged from a technology platform to help teachers track the social emotional health of students to an Australian company which creates curriculum to engage students in project-based learning with 3D printers. 

Previous research partnerships included KIPP KC which hosted Speak Agent, a digital platform tool that focuses on academic language learning that was piloted in 2019. School leaders and the company’s founders were able to determine that, through the use of the tool, students improved test scores and also demonstrated improvement in engagement and confidence. These collaborative findings were detailed  in a research summary report. 

“Our model has evolved in the past six years, but our theory of change has remained consistent,” said Boody. “We’ve always believed that those closest to the issues in education--parents, students, educators--hold the true insight and expertise to find solutions. We’re grateful to both our new and long-term funders for their support and advocacy of this important work.” 

LEANLAB is currently recruiting school systems across the Kansas City metro area to take part in their 2020-21 pilot program. Selected schools will receive up to $25,000 in grant funding, professional development, and access to a curated list of emerging education innovations. To learn more about LEANLAB’s Pilot School program and to apply, visit their website at: https://www.leanlabeducation.org/schools