Calling Others to Join Collaborative Fund (Update)
In the spirit of collaboration and new practice sharing so we can all work towards better and more equitable workplaces, I am sharing an update on our latest hiring process.
After announcing the open positions on our blog and promoting the post in key newsletters like the one from Allraise, we received 250+ applications over three weeks. Each applicant answered these five questions (which we selected to help us control for what we think are the five key skills for this role - hustle, analysis, creativity, inclusive, community centered), then we redacted names, emails and resumes during the application review in order to remove as much implicit bias in the process as possible. We narrowed the 250+ down to 40 based on these responses alone, and then started our initial phone screens.
By no means is this process perfect (we are always looking to improve), but we are convinced that not going through a typical “resume review” process helped us focus our energy on the right candidates more quickly - and may have helped remove some of the bias that many research studies have revealed to exist in the traditional hiring process. By redacting names and emails, and reviewing only the answers to the questions, we think we helped surfaced a much wider range of backgrounds we wouldn’t typically see in a traditional process, including: a former police officer, a coder living in Nigeria, a former white house intern, a hospital operator, and a sports scientist for the NBA among others. We were, quite frankly, blown away by the quality and thoughtfulness of these responses, and the varied backgrounds of our candidates. It’s clear that this is an incredibly talented group of people. Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply!
We are now in the middle of our final interview process and have narrowed the candidate pool down to our final applications for both the SF position and the NY position. We are looking forward to these new team members joining us. We can’t hire everyone (yet), so if you are someone who applied but we do not end up hiring, we would love to connect you to our portfolio companies, should that be of interest to you.