If Not Now, When? Learning From One Organization’s Effort to Hire for Diversity and Excellence

Abstract

Many education organizations are committed to diversity, but few achieve it in their staffing. Organizations typically recruit from the professional networks of their existing staff. Selection processes can be influenced by evaluation bias, and interview experiences can be impacted by stereotype threat. Without focused attention to hiring practices, predominantly white organizations often maintain a predominantly white demographic profile despite a desire to diversify.

TeachingWorks, an organization at the University of Michigan (U-M) dedicated to improving teacher education, engaged in an effort to try out a set of practices for hiring for diversity and excellence. This effort intersected with an ongoing conversation about how to make explicit the ways in which our mission to advance justice through teacher education shape our work. Guided by recommendations from the U-M’s Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence, the team implemented practices designed to reduce evaluation bias and stereotype threat. During my residency at TeachingWorks, I coordinated our team’s effort to implement and learn from these practices.

While we worked hard to implement the recommended practices, we also struggled to navigate tensions between the work the recommendations demanded and the timeline and design of the grant for which we were hiring. While our initial implementation did not change our organization’s demographic profile, it did lay a foundation of knowledge, practices, and tools that will better position us to hire for diversity and excellence in the future.

In this paper, I will document our implementation, and suggest five areas of work that emerged as having been underdeveloped in this hiring process and may be opportunities for growth in the future. These areas of work include: developing a shared definition of and rationale for diversity; continuously developing the applicant pool; monitoring the diversity of the applicant pool; refining the way we use shared criteria to evaluate candidates; and interviewing candidates who decline our offers to identify ways to make our offers more attractive, especially to candidates of color. Our experience may be useful for other predominantly white organizations seeking to define diversity and achieve it through hiring.