6 Tip for Making Your Museum's Next HR Search Inclusive and Equitable
Hiring is about relationship building. Yes, the museum is building a team or filling a leadership position, but the moment you join the Zoom call and become a talking head the size of a postage stamp, everyone's soft skills are on display. If you're the applicant, your job isn't to best your competition in some imaginary race, spewing a laundry list of achievements at your listeners. It's to be your best self. Do you seem like someone who listens? Are you picking up on social queues? Your potential employer is on display too. If museum staff is interviewing as a group, how do they interact with one another? Are they the kind of team that seems irresistible or do they give off a fog of dysfunction?
How the process is structured really matters. My employer has worked very, very hard in the last few years to build a better hiring process, one that's multi-layered, many-voiced, and equitable. In the bad old days, hiring might be done by one individual from behind a desk. They opened letters and somehow deciphered who they wanted to speak to. There might or might not be a phone call, but many times it was simply to set up an in-person interview. There, one person represented the institution in all its glory, deciding whether you were a good fit. If you met other staff it was to say hello while you toured the site. Thankfully, those days are over. By acknowledging the gravity of the hiring process and working with HR, it's possible to create a process that helps eliminate bias while incorporating a variety of voices.
Keeping an open mind is really important. Whether we admit it or not, we all come to the process hampered with ideals, and those ideals intertwine with bias to create some optimal candidate who we consciously or unconsciously hold up for comparison. Sometimes it's a detailed picture that includes graduate degrees, internships, conference presentations, and previous organizations worked. Sometimes it's as simple as not male, not old. But if your ideal is more about you than it is about your museum, you're in trouble. The choice to pick an older person of color versus a young white millennial isn't about you. It's for your organization. Your vote--hopefully among many--should not be for superficials, but for the person (and their values) whose leadership practice best benefits your museum or heritage organization.
If your organization isn't diverse, be transparent: If you're inviting a "first" candidate--first woman, first person of color, first LGBTQ--to interview, and you know they'll walk into a room where they feel othered, be open about it. Acknowledge your organization's lack of diversity, and ask whether being part of that change is something the candidate wants to participate in.
Group-think is important: One of the things I applaud about my organization's rehabilitated hiring process is that opinions are expressed in private via a common form. Why does that matter? Well, our organization, and perhaps yours too, has some dominant voices. When a hiring committee makes decisions around a table, individual opinions sometimes don't receive equal weight. Filling out a common form, and assigning numerical scores to aspects of the interview helps make the process more equitable for candidates and interviewers.
Organizational self-knowledge is key: In a perfect world we'd all be self-aware, and, as a result, so would our museums and heritage organizations. If your job is to find a curator, an advancement professional, a designer or educator, you need to understand your organization fully. Too often hiring committees are thrilled when they discover common ground between themselves and the candidate, but what really matters is alignment between the candidate and the museum. Hiring committees benefit from talking about the organization and its values at the outset so they begin with a common understanding of their museum's values. To return to where I began, hiring is a stressful process for both employer and applicant, but your staff, as we've said multiple times here, is a huge investment. You want to get it right: to hire the best person you can, whose values align, while their creativity stimulates healthy change and growth. Take a look at the way you hire, the process you go through, and make changes now. Despite the American Alliance of Museum's longstanding resistance to requiring salary listings in job announcements, it has done a deep dive into equitable hiring, and the resources are formidable. Use them. As with so much in the museum workplace hiring is a process well worth the investment. Know yourself. Know your workplace and its values. Whether employer or applicant, we all want a process that's equitable, that's built on behavioral questions, and that aligns individual and museum values, not superficials. Joan Baldwin Image: ThoughtCo
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