Hiring with Intention: An Executive Search Case Study (EP.93)

Speaker A: Quick favor before we dive in. If this conversation sparks something for you, share it. Text a link to a friend, drop it in Slack, or post it on your socials. The more of us sharing what works, what doesn't, and how to reimagine work itself, the better our workplaces can be. And thanks for spreading the word. M welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck A podcast exploring what happens when we center people, purpose and possibility at work. I'm your host, Tim Cenova. Well, that's not entirely accurate for this episode. A few days ago I joined some of my awesomest colleagues, Katrina Donald, Julia, Mae Lopez and Jody Kobalt for a session titled Hiring with Intention as part of the International association of venue managers E3 series. We decided to get the band back together and reprise a longer play version of that discussion. So over to you, Jody.

Speaker B: Thank you, Tim My name is Jodi Cobalt and I'm the Director of Production at Yerba Buena center for the Arts. My pronouns are she, her and I couldn't be more honored to be moderating today's conversation on inclusive hiring. We all know that the success of our organizations are shaped by the people on our teams, and while the needs of our workplace continue to evolve, many hiring practices haven't kept pace too often. They still reflect outdated, dusty approaches that can unintentionally reinforce bias, concentrate power, and limit those who have access to opportunity. Today is about exploring how we can do better, more thoughtfully, more equitably, and more aligned with the values we want our organizations to embody. I am joined by the three incredible people that Tim mentioned. They're incredible people and culture leaders, all of whom I had the privilege of working with at YDCA when I was the Chief of Operations during those pandemic years. Julie May was our Director of People and Culture, Tim served as the interim Head of the department and Katrina, who's partnered with Tim for many years, joined us as part of the search team we built to hire the head of External Relationship. We got the band back together to share what we tried, what we learned from it, and the insights that can help all of us dust off and rethink our hiring practices. Julie Mae, do you want to jump in and introduce yourself?

Speaker C: I'm excited to be with the band again. My name is Julie Mae Lopez, first name Julie Mae. I use she her pronouns as Jodi shared. I worked alongside her as the Director of People and Culture at AH YBCA for several years and currently I provide HR guidance and partnership for small to mid sized mission driven organizations through my Consultancy People Power Solutions.

Speaker B: Katrina, do you want to go next?

Speaker D: Hi all, I'm Katrina Donald. The work I do is a blend of organizational system design, developmental evaluation and adaptive strategy coaching. It means that I'm building learning and feedback loops into real time complex change initiatives within systems and organizations. And I do that work in partnership with Berkshire and SAC and Tim Sonova, but also as part of my own organization. Ever so curious.

Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you Tim.

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Tim. He him. My work fits in a couple of different buckets. Interim fractional Chief Operating Officer, Chief People Officer is one bucket. And then workplace innovation with Work Shouldn't Suck is another bucket where I get to do really cool projects with the people on this podcast together. One of them was when we were working at YBCA together. And so it's really exciting to have this longer play time together to really go into what we tried as a group and what worked, what didn't, what we iterated forward with. So I'm really jazzed to be back together with the band.

Speaker B: We've talked a lot as a team about dusty hiring practices, ones that were built in a time that doesn't reflect where we are right now. Tim, how would you describe this moment and what it means for hiring practices today?

Speaker A: We are living through a series of unprecedented changes and it's kind of the convergence of disruption from COVID to AI to random things going sideways on a Tuesday. And we're kind of situated when we think about hiring and workplace design at that intersection of the old way of doing things that really hasn't changed for decades. It's dusty and, and the new kind of multiverse of possibilities and the tension that we experienced holding both of those things at the same time. I mean, think about COVID that was six years ago and it kind of rewired expectations around where, when, how we can even work. Before that time, a lot of roles had to be in a physical location or were built around that. And so we in the middle of the night for some organizations, just made up new ways of working that many are still trying to catch up with. We have policies that are outdated from 2020 that people are still trying to figure out how to document that. And so you have that where it's like Covid changed things. And then in the US many things are changed around employment law. Things like the reception of Executive Order 11246 that for most people in the United States has been a part of their entire work lives. It's literally formed the structure for affirmative action plans, diversity in hiring Expectations, federal enforcement as a backstop for hr. And so like when we think about hiring and HR and even what HR departments are supposed to do, we designed stuff for this thing in 1965 and since then, but now we're sitting with, well that's not the case. And so all these things seem to be moving in different directions. And then you layer in AI and it's that emoji where the headache is exploding. It's like things have just speeding up so quickly and we're trying to catch up with these things that are outdated, that were trying to make incremental improvements that are just in an exponential landscape for change. And so things are snapping back under that tension. We're trying to do our best with limited resources. And so we as human beings are both at a very interesting place in history where we can design the things that we want our organizations to be and to look like that are more values aligned and also holding those practices that predate many of us in work and that we inherited when we came into workplaces. And so when I think about hiring and in particular work we did on the search at YBCA where we say, what if we just reimagined it? What if we centered candidate care? What if we centered inclusion? How might that change all these processes that ah, most people just have taken from a book from 1985 about how to hire. And so that's what I see. That's like the dustiness that we're in today and also the possibility of what we're able to do.

Speaker C: That's exactly right, Tim. Um, at uh, YBCA we had the opportunity to explore, explore creativity and reinvention. And that was our chance to deeply reflect on uh, YBCA's hiring process, ground them in our organizational values and reimagine the possibilities with hiring as a competitive advantage. So back in 2022 we had identified an opportunity to scope and hire this executive level position that would lead both marketing and development, which was the head of external relations. This is going to be a new, unique and impactful role for the organization. Particularly given that we were two years into the pandemic and there was a clear need to bring in a leader into the team to address the unprecedented and unique challenges that Covid had created for YVCA and just all, all of downtown San Francisco in the city. We were also in a transition time with leadership and had both a mix of new and long tenured staff like myself and Jody. So we thought that this was the right opportunity to take care and thoughtfulness in defining this executive level role and hiring for it in a way that carefully articulated the needs and goals of the staff and organization at this unique inflection point that we were in, while also exemplifying YBCA's organizational values. In my time at YVCA, I had established a recruitment process with equity in mind. But of course I knew that there had to be other elements and approaches to make it more inclusive and aligned. Another challenge that we faced was this being a one of a kind senior level position in a place based nonprofit organization in one of the most expensive cities in the country. So we were very likely not going to get a big candidate pool if we just did the same thing everyone else was doing. The pandemic and shift to remote work, as Tim mentioned, changed the market for where people could find opportunities outside of the Bay Area and around the country. We knew that this process would require extra capacity and extra care and obviously it wasn't going to be a search we could manage alone. So I was very happy and lucky that with Tim and Katrina, uh, guiding, there was this chance to reimagine what the search process could look like if it were deconstructed and centered. Anti racism and accessibility. This is what laid the foundation for crafting an intentional and inclusive process to hiring that better aligned with YBCA's values.

Speaker D: As we think about what the opportunity was at ybca, it's juicy enough just on its own, the way it's been described. But there are two pieces here that I think are really important to kind of note about hiring in general. Number one is that hiring doesn't happen in a vacuum. There are always other things going on, complexity of the organization. And as Julie Mae also mentioned, kind of the city and the way that the pandemic was forcing hands and creating different kinds of responses in that moment. And so the hiring process, which typically follows a standard playbook, but number two, unregulated, wholly unregulated, which means that people might follow a typical arc, but they all do it differently. So because of that and because of this, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Context is always shifting piece. We had some key assumptions that were really front of mind for us. On the one hand, in sort of a typical process, the job posting rarely describes the actual job candidates are stepping into when they're hired. So we wanted to make sure that the posting accurately fit the job someone would be taking on. We also knew that in a typical process, information flows one way right from the candidate to the organization. So we Wanted to pay attention to the power dynamic and really try to balance that so that information could flow both ways and that candidates, as well as the organization, could make informed decisions about what they were signing up for or who they were selecting for this role. Third point we were really interested in looking at was that typically candidates are expected to stay on the hook until the organization is ready to make the call. And as we said, it doesn't happen in a vacuum so often there are delays that people don't expect that can be difficult to get people in the room to have interviews with a committee and things like that. So there's lots of ways that things could be interrupted or stalled during a typical process and the expectation that a candidate will be on the hook until we're ready. We wanted to try to flip that as well and to say, how do we remain in conversation with candidates throughout the search process so that there's more transparency in that, so that we're giving them reasonable updates in a reasonable timeframe for humans, not just for the process or for the timeline of the organization. We also wanted to kind of really challenge this idea that you know fit when you see it, because there is so much bias inherent in what we think fit looks like or how we've been conditioned to see fit in organizations and on teams as people who actually think like us or who have similar styles or vibes that really can, like, work with how we're already used to working. We know coming into searches like this, that as soon as you add a new member to a team, you're actually redesigning the way that that team works and functions. And so we wanted to really be able to question and interrogate the biases that we might have in the room in order to really explore what a match for this role and for the organization in this moment would be, rather than what we think a fit might have been more categorically. So the challenge was to deliberately interrupt that playbook, that typical playbook. And at every step, one of the ways that we did that was to ask ourselves, where is this process extractive? Where is it snapping back to power dynamics that might have been typical of the old playbook? Where are we asking things that might not be stage or phase appropriate from candidates given their investment in the process or our investment in them as a candidate? We were always asking ourselves and discussing as, uh, a, uh, committee where the characteristics of white supremacy culture were showing up in the process, where were we defaulting to our sense of urgency? Where were we overemphasizing the value of the written word, where were maybe we being defensive about process that we were used to or that were typical? And where do we need to sort of think outside the box on that? And what would it look like to design this process as an alternative right here at that stage when we got there, there was a lot of emergence. We were paying attention to what was coming up, what we were learning from the previous phase, how we were adapting those processes as we went.

Speaker B: One thing that really stood out to me about this process was the candidate experience. All of those things that you just sort of named Katrina of things that the team really focused on and how to think outside the box. Dust off these processes that we've done forever and really just try something in this moment, in this really unique moment in our history of workplace. The candidate experience piece is really fascinating to me. It's something that honestly I had not really thought much about before this process began and really feel like I learned a lot from all of you and your expertise and you each have this experience from multiple perspectives, right? So you've all been candidates for jobs. Julie Mae I think maybe I was even on the hiring process when you were hired originally at, uh, YBCA as your first role, before you, as you came up into the Director of People and Culture role. So you've all been candidates, you've all been parts of hiring teams and led those hiring teams. Juliane, do you see these as distinct experiences or different sides of the same coin? And how does that understanding shape how you have been thinking about and continue to think about improving the system?

Speaker C: Um, one thing about the hiring process is that it can often feel like a one way street when it actually should be a two way street. As a hiring team, you might be interviewing and evaluating candidates to fill an open position, but as a candidate you are also interviewing the hiring panel and the team and figuring out if this is the right opportunity for you, the right team, the right company, and if you are the right person. So there is reciprocity there. Candidates aren't just quote unquote lucky to get this job. We're also lucky if they choose to join us. They have knowledge, unique experience and great skills, skills to offer and ultimately agency in the process. A typical search process on the hiring side may run by withholding of, um, information and if first prove it to us that you're a worthy kind of mentality so it can feel imbalanced. In crafting a value centered hiring process for the YBCA search, this reimagined that one way power dynamic and flipped the script by committing to be as transparent as possible in a number of ways. What was unique and different about the search was just this amount of information both sourced about the role and then made available to applicants and candidates throughout the process so that they could make a more informed decision, get excited about the opportunity, and also show up in the hiring process to communicate and convey how their experience and skills were a fit for the role and the team in terms of shaping how to improve the system or process. A few applicants actually sent feedback like how that they were so impressed with the clarity of the job description and the diversity of supporting materials, they noted the thoughtfulness and care and attention behind the supporting videos and audio assets, uh, podcasts like this. So the approach of being generous with information about the role, about the company, and providing those resources made the opportunity just incredibly clear, unique and helpful context to improve the experience for applicants and candidates.

Speaker D: I love that connection to generosity and thinking about how when we're intentionally generous in the process as a hiring organization, we really can invite that reciprocity. So for me, what I would add here is this idea of curiosity and how, if we're curious about how the process that we've designed with intention feels from the candidate perspective. Right. Often we can be in a process and be actually having two different experiences of something from different sides of the table. And so there's an opportunity from the hiring chair to think about candidate care as we're keeping candidates on the hook. But when we actually really understand what candidates are experiencing in the process, we start to realize that every touch point is contributing to the data that they're using to make their decisions. So when they start waiting for a really long time to hear a response, they start doubting maybe their performance in the interviews or whether their materials were, uh, up to snuff. And in fact, it could have absolutely nothing to do with the candidate. But we're creating this energy and this dynamic in the process that doesn't exhibit that care, that doesn't have that care baked in, because we're intentionally sort of offsetting that, even though we don't mean to. So that silence between stages, the like ambush when you find out that you're actually in a room with eight other people, maybe you didn't know. And so we want to tell them a little bit about who's in the room. We want to give bios, help them to make connections. The videos that we did in that process was aimed to sort of also introduce the candidates to people they would be speaking to in the process in Service to having them show up and have some familiarity in the room to be able to really understand, oh, yeah, I'm prepared for this. I knew you would be here, Jody, or I knew, you know, Julie Mae, you would be in this room, and I heard you say something in that conversation, and so you get disarmed a little bit in there. So I would say candidate care is generous, but it's also just smart design. Right? Like it the ability to be empathetic and really understand how to put candidates at, uh, ease so they can bring their best foot forward from the candidate chair. This also applies, right? It's this understanding of organizational reality. So when we understand the pressures of the hiring team, when we can be a little bit transparent about the timeline or who's in the room and why they're in the room or the type of questions that we're asking, it actually speaks volumes and it actually helps people really understand how the process is reflecting organizational realities and is not specifically a reflection on your worth. So from that other side of the coin, it lets candidates navigate that system with its own logic and navigate it with clarity and less anxiety. And so that creates agency for the candidate, which we think is really important. It's one of the like highlight underlying underscores of why Tim, uh, and I created Career Camp. It's to have some opportunity for candidates to really learn about what else is going on in the hiring process that is not might be about you, might probably not about you, and how to prepare and adapt and really think about your skills, knowledge and experience in light of the information that you're receiving about that organization.

Speaker A: This is one of the really fun ways that I think organizations can leverage their experience as a candidate to create something better. Many of us have been candidates before, and we have that experience of being ghosted or having getting radio silence for weeks after we've had a great interview, or getting a generic condolence email after we've been in this process and felt like we got to know these people, but at the end, it's just like they found it online and just sent it to us. So, like, what if we didn't do that? Our organizations are filled with people who have all these great ideas that we can be like, well, why don't we figure out how not to ghost people or be generous in our condolence when people are leaving and what might be helpful at that point? And so I think that's one of the fun things that we were able to do specifically with the YBCA search, where we were like, what if or how might we not do this thing? One of my old co workers once said, every hiring process is an opportunity to make one of our fans really excited and piss off a bunch of our customers who were previously fans of our organization. So like, what if that wasn't the case? What if everyone had a better connection to the organization, even if they weren't the person who gets offered the job at the end? And it made me think about my time at uh, Fractured Atlas where we really focused on how do we create an environment that can deliver stellar customer service. I was going to places like Zappos and Zehrmann's and really working with a team. I was trying to study what makes great customer service and realized places like Zappos at the time were known for really great customer service. For some cool things they were doing, but also the floor for great customer service, like the bar was on the floor. Customer service is routinely horrible. So like just treat people like humans and all of a sudden it's like, wow, that's stellar customer service. Most hiring processes are horrible. So what if we just treated people like human beings, like we would want to be treated where we're going through them and, and that's how we can create these really cool ideas. I had this other realization a while back. It's easy, I think with the Math on the YBC role because that role comped $200,000 and when you added in benefits and retirement, let's say 250,000 was the total for a year for that role. That's a senior level role. They likely stay three to five years. So let's just say four years because it makes the math easy. That's a million dollar proposition. And so from an organizational side, how much work would we be putting into a million dollar project to make sure it's successful and that we just don't set a bunch of money on fire. And then from the candidate side, if we were going for a million dollar contract, what kind of effort would we put into it? How might we show up differently? And I think the interesting piece here though is how from a candidate side and from an employer side, we calibrate our effort to where we are in the process. So from an organization side, don't ask people to do all of this work just to apply when most people are going to get cut before they even get an interview. And from the candidate side, most candidates have a lot of other things going on in their lives. So this is but a moment in their day, applying for this role, showing up for this thing. How can we calibrate how much work we need to do to show up authentically in our best selves, but also acknowledging like there's so much other things going on in our lives? So one of the ways we did this with YBCA search was to give as much information as we possibly can upfront. Julie Mae and Katrina have already shared a number of things we've done here. And it was in service of treating hiring as a marketing campaign. I think what's really interesting in doing it at YBC was YBC has marketing campaigns for performances, for exhibitions, for events. Why don't we treat hiring like that? Why do people just typically post in one or two places and just hope for the best? What if we actually created a surround marketing approach where there's different media that people can read and watch and listen to? And what if we have extensive benefits package so, uh, everyone knows what the benefits are, what the comp is, who's in the room, and then let people decide how much they want to take in at a certain part. What was really cool about that and about how hiring can be a competitive advantage was I think we heard from more people who were just really jazzed about the way that search was approached than who were interested in applying for the job. We had a really great candidate pool, but we also had people who were like, this is just cool about how people do it and then be able to see, you could see other organizations that were saying, hey, we're trying this out here, or uh, we're doing this thing. And it was this moment where we were all kind of inspiring each other with the work that we were doing at organizations and it transcended this one really key role. But to more like, how can we show up in our sector, in the field more fully and more human for everyone who's going through hiring processes and for the organizations that are trying to run these in more values aligned way.

Speaker B: You've all sort of alluded to this specific search that collectively happened at yvca. I would love to dig in a little bit and deliver some really key things. How you disrupted the process and made it better and those moments that we all learned from in the process. So coming back to that external relations search, can you each walk us through a moment or two during that process? Particularly I think during that screening and interview phase that surprised you or challenged you and shifted how you think about hiring and give our listeners something to actually try out.

Speaker D: One of my favorite moments, and I think favorite because I was surprised again and again, and again, with each candidate that we spoke to was in the screening calls that Tim and I did before we started the formal interview process. And so we had 55 sort of medium list candidates that Tim and I reached out to and had 20 minute conversations with as a way to sort of learn about the candidates beyond what was on the page in their resumes and their cover letters that they submitted. These calls were designed around a really simple premise that the most important thing at this point stage in continuing the conversation about the role wasn't actually evaluating the candidates against a broader checklist than what we could garner from their resume cover letter. It was actually about understanding how they connected this role to their own story and their own lived experience and work history and career aspirations. When you go into a typical process, you're often asked, tell us about yourself in light of this role, or why do you want this job? Or however they frame it. It's some intro kind of icebreaker style question that people get asked. And so we wanted to take a little spin on that and say, connect the dots. We literally called these dot connector conversations. We wanted to ask people to help us connect the dots between where they've been in their different roles and in their work experience, et cetera, and why they're here talking to us about the role. Help us see what's not on the page, help us really identify you as a candidate, as a person, with the work you've done in the resume and how you're making the link to why you might be a fit for this role. So we gave them that prompt in advance. We let them know that that was sort of the scope of the conversation. They wouldn't be asked to defend anything on their resume or tell us anything else. We just were curious about how they would tell that story. We wanted to give them the opportunity to make the leaps visible that we wouldn't be able to see so that we could speak to the rest of the hiring committee and say, here's the fire, here's the energy that this candidate is really bringing into this role that you might not get a sense of when you look at a standard template for a resume or a polished language that often shows up in a cover letter. And what I discovered in this was that some of the most compelling candidates, like, again, surprise, surprise, surprise, throughout this process, these candidates had through lines that looked unconventional on paper, but that were deeply coherent the moment you understood that person's values and intentions and the previous work and how they were making those links. The truth is that for many of Those candidates, a standard process would have filtered them out before we were able to learn that and before we were able to really get that story. And it actually resulted in a shift in some of our most recommended candidates because of these stories. Right. If you had that on the typical process, you'd say, these are maybe the eight or 10 people we think you should speak to. And that list got jumbled and mixed around because of these stories. It changed entirely how I thought about screening, because you typically want to go through a rubric and you're putting things together. And so this way, one of the stories that I just keep thinking about and I keep telling people about is we saw this resume and it. It had the bones of what we were looking for. But one of the things that was on there was like, this person was a meteorologist on television, on the news. And we were like, how do you get from being a meteorologist on the news to wanting to be the lead of external relations in a, uh, like arts and culture organization? Connect those dots for us. And the way that they told that story was all about the people and the connections and the community. You're looking at weather events, sometimes really serious weather events, when you're on television and you're explaining it to a population that is all taking different information from what you're sharing. For some people, it means you have to batten down the hatches. For others, it has different connotations. For others, it's just a nice to know it's not happening in your area. And how you deliver that information really matters and has to be sensitive to who the people and who the community are, uh, that are affected by that thing that's happening. And that kind of, you know, went into. And then what I started to do was I started to work with this environmental agency. And I was thinking about how the impacts of those weather events created these different dynamics in communities and how we were able to share the news and what this organization was doing. And that really gave me another passion for speaking about and really learning about and sharing the events and ongoings of these communities. And then I have this passion for the arts as well, because there's part of this, like, TV Persona that I had, and I had this experience almost like an actor having this thing in front of the screen that I saw myself in this space. And I was really curious about what would it look like to tell these kinds of stories and be attuned to these kinds of communities and do it for a thing that, like, I've got this little bit of Familiarity for. But a lot of appreciation in my life for that story really got, uh, us the desire to put that person in front of this committee in a different way. That's just one example, but there literally were examples all over the place.

Speaker B: I love this. Figuring out how at different levels of the organization, depending on what kind of role we're hiring for, how do we include this? In a way, I love that they had the question ahead of time so they didn't have to think about this on the spot because it's so innately who they are. And to reflect back on one's life, on how to get from one place to another is. That takes some thought, I think, for most folks. And also how interviewing skill is not necessarily the same skill that we need in the job. So giving folks a, uh, heads up about that conversation. Most of the people I hire, the skill set it needed to sit in an interview process is not at all the skill set I actually need them to be good at. So it's this strange thing coming from that place of human first, how are we not doing this at every turn? And then there's this way of weaving in engagement and understanding how a future employee could be engaged in our organization. How an employee is engaged in the job leads to how good they are at their job, how satisfactory their colleagues are with them, and how long they stay with us. Going back to that investment of the hiring process, understanding how somebody gets to wanting this specific job and how they're engaged in the process is like, how are we not starting there for everyone? Thank you for bringing up that specific conversation. Tim, what would you say stands out in the process?

Speaker A: There are three examples that really stand out for me when I think about this. The first one is we had a great group of people that chose to be a part of this process. At the end, we could have hired any one of them. They would have each brought different things to the organization. And we wanted a way to take their brain out for a spin on, uh, something that was related to work that they would be doing in a way that felt similar to what they might be doing inside the organization. What was really cool about the moment when the search was happening was there was an exhibition with Liz Luhrmann and Brett Cook in the spaces in ybca. Liz Luhrmann has this framework called Critical response Process. We benefited from Liz being there doing this thing. And also that Katrina happens to be pretty familiar with critical response process and could bring it into this process that we could use in the final interview. That was one of the things that we used a, ah, bit of AI when we got started by like, how can we get a really juicy scenario that picks up these things we still want to know from candidates that's enough. Like the work that they would be doing, but not asking them to do free work for us and then use that in this CRP process. That really fit the moment at ybca. And that was an amazing process and that felt really genuine in the moment that we were doing the search. And the other two things that came from that we were asking people to do work outside of the interview process. We've seen this more frequently, which is a really great thing to see that companies are compensating people, at least giving them an honorarium acknowledging you're doing intellectual work outside of this process. In order to inform the process, the search committee decided that for every candidate in that final round, we would give them a $250 honorarium. What we wanted to do, going back to the joy and fun and barring I guess, from Zappos, delivering wow and happiness, was as soon as the candidate left the room, that money was Venmo to them. They didn't have to invoice it. They didn't have to wait 30 days. We were using this as an opportunity to provide a little bit of wow. They literally walk out of the room and the money's there, acknowledging the contribution that they've made for that interview. And the second thing that we did as part of that, and this is where like, we as a committee were just tossing around ideas about like, how can we make this last interview really genuine to the organization and embed these values for the final interview. We benefited that all of the candidates were located in the Bay Area so we could have the interview in person, not on zoom. Everyone came to ybca, but the room we were using was a little convoluted to get to. So I met each one of the candidates across the street in the building line lobby to check in first and be. How are you feeling? Any questions? This is what it's going to be like when you walk in the room. The other thing we did was we gave them a care package. It is one of the moments of my career that I wish I would have had a camera because I was the only person who got to see this. Getting to hand each one of the cans be like, thank you so much for all the work you've done. We really genuinely appreciate having a chance to get to know you. Here's just a small token of our Appreciation, A, uh, YBCA tote bag or workshop mug. I forget what else was in there, but, like, the shock that was on people's faces and surprise, no one's received a care package when they've arrived for an interview. And so, thinking back to how do we center those values? If we were going through this process, what would we want to do? How might we live our values and live this, Treating people as human beings, treating people the way we want to, and also align with the specifics of the organization at the time and place in which we were doing it. And so those are three things that always stand out for me as ways we were able to embed candidate care into the design of the process and felt like we made some connections that. I mean, I still think about those four candidates, each one of the things they brought to that final room and how hard it was to make the final decision because they each showed something so cool and different about how they would approach it.

Speaker B: All of the things you just talked about are really rooted in values. Through this process, how do you make sure that we're not overselling an organization? How do we make sure that how we're approaching the candidate care during the process is actually in line with how we take care of our employees and which one needs to come first? What kind of people do we need to hire into roles in order to carry through the care of the employees that we all are hoping for? Also, how do we set the new employee up to succeed, knowing what kind of actual company they're they're coming into?

Speaker D: Having been somebody who has been pointed at, uh, across the room in somebody's first three months and said, you, you brought me here, you know, that idea of the authenticity of the role and the organization and trying to really have people understand, you know, the context that they're coming into is particularly salient for me. One of the things that, for me, guides that is this idea that not only is trust relational built over time as we show up, but it's also transactional. It doesn't take long to lose trust. With this search, I, as the outsider on this search, had the opportunity to speak to so many members of the YBCA team across levels of the hierarchy, across departments, functional areas of the organization. Anybody that may cross paths and have collaborative touch points with the person in this role, I got to speak to and ask about, you know, what they needed and what they thought the role needed and what would be helpful and what kind of skills or what kind of leadership would be useful. And then we Were able to sort of take stock of that in a, uh, different way and use that to create the posting for the role and use that to inform the job description. We got to have a chance to, throughout all of the steps of the phase, say, remember what the team has been saying about this role as a way to ground us in what questions are we asking and how are we asking them and how are we setting up the scenarios and what does that look like? And so even just having the attunement, uh, to sort of having heard and acknowledged and understood the way that this role would activate in the organization went a long way in helping us build some relational trust throughout with the candidate. And so that when they got there, there would be people that they knew and had a chance to build relationships with that they could be friendly with or have the opportunity to feel like they could ask different questions to. They had a sense of the broad range of tensions and issues and challenges and opportunities that the organization was juggling at the same time. Remember, this doesn't happen in a vacuum, right. And so when we could do that, candidates had at least a sense of. And then the question is, how does this play out in real life once you've arrived and what does that look like? Because you don't want to overcorrect in that process and then have people come in and be like, well, that was a fantasy. Even though I have a good idea of the real life of the organization. Right. And so that's where this idea of really intentional onboarding comes in. And how do we set up the first steps, the first introductions, the key priorities in the right time, in the right moments, so that they are actually integrated into the way the organization is working and what it's focused on and how those real life conversations are happening in priority as they're going. Right. And so that kind of allows them to have the freshness of being able to ask questions related to what they heard in the process and then have people feed in and fill in some of the blanks that they might be noticing or experiencing. So there was lots of ways that we did that with check ins, with senior leaders, having informal lunches and being able to have a, uh, partner from the search committee supporting them. But it was really front of mind to develop that into the plan so that they could sense that resonance when they got in there.

Speaker B: Julie me is our insider. What surprised you about this project? Challenged you, shifted the way you thought.

Speaker C: One of the elements that changed how I think about hiring is the intention to deeply learn about candidates with every touch point throughout the process as we've been talking about, ultimately we're going to make a decision and work with the person that is the final candidate every day. So how could we leverage each phase to learn as much as we can about them to help set them up for success once they have actually joined the team and throughout that onboarding process? So taking reference checks for example. Reference checks can be typically seen as a formality or doing due diligence for risk management. But this search framed reference checks with the purpose of really getting to better understand how a candidate does their best work and can be supported. As an example, we ask references, what advice would you give to the supervisor and colleague of uh, the candidate to help the candidate thrive? A, uh, really interesting approach in the final round was instead of asking the traditional what are your strengths or what are your weaknesses? We asked the candidates to actually predict two things that each of their references would say was something that they could better develop to be an even better, more awesome professional. Then during our reference checks we shared the candidates responses to see if there was alignment or if the reference wanted to offer something different. It was really great to hear some of the candidates responses, either just being really confident, like oh, I know what Tim is going to say about me, or I know what Jodi is going to say about me, but in a really vulnerable and honest kind of way, or the reference check saying, oh, uh, I could see why this candidate would say that or think that about themselves, but I actually wouldn't have said that I want to offer something different. So again, this was a really unique opportunity to better understand and relate and develop that relationship with the candidates, to learn how they could be supported, to do their best work. Also ultimately take that information and bring it into the onboarding process to really set them up for success. I did add the reference check questions into YBCA standard template. So the shift for me was that when you lead with the intention to learn and support, the search itself becomes the first stage of a successful long term partnership. It shifts the dynamic of the search from a, uh, high stakes evaluation to a collaborative foundation building practice.

Speaker B: You all created a collaborative foundational building practice in the work. Once we were in the interview process, how did you make it accessible for people with disabilities? How did you make sure you were reaching out to a diverse group of candidates to begin with?

Speaker D: I can speak to this question that might bring us full circle to the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about the design challenge of this work and how we really wanted to center Equity and inclusion values throughout this whole process. Insofar as this search, some of the ways that we did that was in having those broad perspectives weigh in on the role. So we were getting lots of different power perspectives, levels of power that were interacting with this role. So across the hierarchy, different levels of touch in there, like their perspectives on what this role really needed to be. From the get go. Our materials really reflected an inclusive understanding of what we wanted the role to be and who we were looking for. And so we went through, you know, empathy mapping processes. Where would candidates who had some of these knowledge, skills and experience, what would they be talking about in their circles? Where would they be going for information? Where are they hanging out online? What groups are they parts of? How do we ask this already diverse population at ah, YBCA where they go to look for jobs like this? How do we kind of expand that sourcing strategy was one part of it. Another part as it related to the materials of the search were making sure that we were paying attention to visual accessibility through contrast ratios with the fonts and the colors that we were using. We were highlighting really obviously like key components of the roles. We had audio recording versions of the posting so that people could hear and listen to what the posting details were in an audio format. So we were doing all of those things to set up for a broader audience to receive the kind of information of the posting. Tim, you want to talk a little bit more about where that might have shown up elsewhere in the process?

Speaker A: Well, this work was leveraging work already going on at, uh, YBCA around accessibility. And so this is one of those examples where we're like, we're going through a hiring process and you and the kind of working group at YBCA were working on accessibility in various aspects at ybca. And so this was one way we were able to reflect that commitment in that search and in future searches.

Speaker C: Jumping off what Katrina shared about the empathy mapping and the team had identified where we would post. This was treated like a marketing campaign. And so it was posted in many different ways. And there were a number of ways that the team, the board members, the staff were encouraged to share the job opportunity. A final candidate shared that they had seen the job posting four different times in four different sites. And they had taken that as a sign that they had to apply for the position. And so I think that speaks to the number of ways or the approach that we ensured. We made this opportunity visible and accessible for a, ah, diverse number of candidates to apply.

Speaker B: As we close out the podcast Today we're going to do a pro Tip roundup. I've been lucky enough to be in the same room with you all multiple times and learn a wealth of information could you all offer from both the candidate and the hiring side? What's a thing that you would encourage everyone to put into practice immediately?

Speaker D: Katrina I would say from the candidate side, it's remember that you do have agency in the process, even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, in the way that whatever unregulated process you're involved in is experienced. You can ask questions. You can make sure that the most pertinent or relevant parts of your knowledge, skills and expertise find a way into the conversation. When you're talking to the hiring organization about the role, you can look to your network and get information about the organization or get referral or whatever it is. You have agency in the process and you can make your own decisions as you go based on the data that's coming in as you move through that process. What you're learning about as you go through can be data points for you in really understanding and assessing the opportunity for yourself. And so you have that power in the process. From the hiring side, I would say build in candidate care. Candidate care includes how people receive the information about the opportunity to all those ways we talked about making sure that you're reaching out to a broad and diverse audience for this role. It includes not having these long silent gaps in between phases of the process. It includes gratitude. It includes right, sizing the expectations along the way so that you're not asking too much of candidates too early in the process before you're really invested in their candidacy or they have enough information to feel like it's appropriate to divulge the kind of information you're asking for. Right. We have to, like, work with that. And so care shows up. And when care shows up, that safety or that feeling of trust can start to come through and you get to have more genuine and authentic conversations and you get to better kind of recognize the knowledge, skills and expertise and how they might land and impact the team and the opportunity in the organization.

Speaker C: Julie Mae on the candidate side of course, in the age of AI, it's typical to use AI to help create your resume. The challenges that can lead to so many hundreds of nearly identical applications, and it can make it really hard to stand out. Use AI to generate your resume, but you'll really want to keep that authentic to you and aligned to the company and the role. You'll get a draft, but you want to Add personal anecdotes, add your own unique voice so that it doesn't end up being generic and that you could stand out on the hiring side. One thing to consider to create a more inclusive, accessible process is to consider sending interview questions to candidates in advance. That could look different in a number of ways. That could look like sending some of the questions in advance, maybe like the more juicy scenario based questions that uh, you want that candidate to have a little bit more time to really craft their response. Or it could just be an overview of. Here are some things to come prepared to be able to share or respond to. We had talked about interviewing skills being different from actual on the job skills that might be required. So this can help that experience of instead of evaluating interviewing skills, it can allow candidates to better prepare, it reduces anxiety, it creates a more inclusive, accessible experience for folks so that you can ultimately assess and get an understanding of a candidate's actual skills, experience and capabilities.

Speaker A: Tim, um, I would focus on your KSE's knowledge, skills, experience, expertise for both sides of this one. From the hiring side, centering the knowledge, skills and expertise that are required for this role. Going back to how do you scope the role and then how do you scope the interviews based off of how you scope the roles? What are we trying to learn? What kind of data are we trying to pick up from all these different candidates? And I think this is a way where AI tools can be really useful, where you can say, create scenarios with no right answers based off of these things that we want to learn. I also think this is a way where people inside of your organization are great people to talk to because they do the job. Tell me what scenario you have that you deal with on a regular basis in this role. Let's use that, maybe adapt it slightly for our interview process. Flipping that to the candidate side. I'm a huge fan of what we call the case story bank where you take everything you've possibly done in your career and it may be extending beyond what maybe you would consider your career. I used to coach high school basketball as a high schooler. Something think broadly about you as a human being, all of the things you've done that demonstrate different knowledge, skills and expertise and build a Google sheet or Excel sheet of all those different things where you have what is it? What did you do, who did you work with, what the skills you used. You could use different storytelling techniques like Star or Carl to further break that apart. You can tag it for like change management or HR or finance. And so you have this exhaustive list maybe 100 things long that you can then go to when you're having informational interviews, you're pulling together your materials when you're trying to think about other things besides those three stories that you always kind of default to for your interviews but like, all right, what are those things I should use? This is also a way that you could, if you feel comfortable, put this into something like Claude and say, here's the job posting, here's my case story bank. Create an interview prep for me. What are the things I really should make sure? Whether two or three things I have to make sure I convey regardless of what questions they ask me? What are some yellow or red flags that I might be asked? How can I prepare for those? And so you can use this really rich tool to help you more authentically show up in this really weird construct of a thing where many of us are nervous and really show up in a way that can help people connect the dots between you as an amazing candidate. This role, this organization right now.

Speaker B: Excellent.

Speaker D: Jodi, thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation for bringing this band back together. It was lots of fun. Really, really enjoyed it.

Speaker B: Thank you.

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