Creating Diverse Workplaces: Spotlight on Positively Partners
June 28, 2022
MENTOR believes that all young people need access to caring adults and mentors in their family, community, schools, and in the workplace to achieve their personal and professional goals. Having a champion in the workplace can make or break a young worker’s experience. As we highlight and celebrate our workplace partners, we are featuring Positively Partners as an organization committed to relationship-centered practices and the continued learning that undergirds strong workplace partnerships.
At MENTOR, we make a conscious effort to work with companies and vendors that share the values that drive our work. This was especially important when we began searching for a human resources provider to assist us with recruitment and with day-to-day support for current employees. Tara Spann, MENTOR’s Chief People & Strategy Officer, shares:
“When MENTOR searched for an HR Outsource solution provider, we were intentional about partnering with an organization that shared our values, including diversity and inclusion. Positively Partners has been a real extension of our organization and a trustworthy partner. They know all of our names, our roles, our personalities, and in many cases our employees’ strengths and our opportunities.
We have the difficult conversations to ensure we are equitable in our policies and practices including mirror bias, transparencies in job descriptions, and evolution and innovation in our recruitment and hiring processes to further advance diversity and inclusion. The pipeline of candidates they’ve brought to us through their recruitment methods has been diverse in all facets of being (including race) and our organization has become more diverse as a result.”
We sat down with Vice President Alissa Farber, who oversees the work of the Talent and Recruitment team, and Search Consultant Jung Yun, who works directly with hiring managers to find the top talent and right fits for growing organizations like MENTOR.
Alissa Farber, Vice President
How long have you worked at Positively Partners? In what roles?
I’ve consulted with Positively Partners since 2017 and came on as a Vice President in 2018. I do new business development across our Talent and Recruitment, Outsourced Human Resources, and Human Resources Consulting departments. I also think about how we can grow Positively Partners on a larger scale and ensure clients are engaged and satisfied with our work.
Can you explain a little bit about how you work with different clients? How do you integrate workplace equity into the strategies you develop with them?
I believe that organizations must purposefully invest in the creation of workplaces that enable employees to be their authentic selves and perform at their best. When I meet with a new client, I listen for artifacts, examples, of their equity journey – not just what a client says, but how they engage with me, colleagues, and the ways they describe their work. Coaching is at the center of all aspects of my work so I am always thinking about how I can support and encourage growth, even if it’s in small ways.
In many cases, the desire to be more equitable and inclusive is apparent. The opportunity is to share our experiences and practices that help to disrupt mindsets, habits, and hiring practices that consistently lead to the underrepresentation of employees with traditionally marginalized identities. It has always amazed me the way that small changes can have a profound impact on outcome. I want to be sure to share this with our clients and introduce the practices that we have established as impactful through academic work and our own practice serving organizations exclusively within the nonpractice sector.
Some examples of small changes that can have a big impact include our use of chatbot on our career pages as a way to easily capture and answer questions that, if left unanswered, might result in an applicant assuming that they are unqualified or leaving our site without having submitted an application. Another example relates to our use of language, limiting the use of action words that have been shown to discourage applications from candidates of color, as well as women.
Most importantly, we use a competency-based approach to hiring because we want to ensure the process doesn’t just involve candidates who remind the hiring team of themselves. Otherwise, people subconsciously weed out amazing folks who may not look like them, sound like them, or have gone to similar institutions as them. We open our eyes and our clients’ eyes to new ways of seeing things and people.
How do you feel Positively Partners leadership has helped its clients to diversify their work environments, boards, etc.?
Our belief is that lasting, meaningful change is possible through a multi-disciplinary approach. Most of us in the social impact sector are seeking to honor difference in new ways and find opportunities for restoration and inclusion. Core to this is increasing the diversity of our teams. In practice, this aspiration does not always lead to success. Some of that is because of historical practice (“this is how we’ve always done it”), levels of comfort or buy in across teams, as well as our ability to see beyond our own mirror bias towards what we can appreciate in others. The close-knit, relational nature of our work allows us to better understand where day-to-day organizational practice may not be aligned with that aspiration and gives us the chance to build trusted partnerships where we can illuminate those points in ways that hopefully feel less threatening and more actionable.
Often, we hear teams asking for processes to move faster or for complex issues to be resolved more easily. But speed can be the enemy in honoring difference and truly learning and understanding the perspectives of others. We need to take time to pause, find an interpersonal connection, and be willing to make choices in new ways that may feel disruptive in the short term. And it’s our team’s job to provide guidance and support along the way towards the desired future state.
One example: one of our clients had a sudden change in leadership due to inequitable practices. Absent a formal leader at the helm, we worked closely with employees and the Board to build relational trust, hire an executive team reflective of the organizational mission and values, and stabilize core administrative functions of the organization. We are now two years into our work together and continuing to build a productive partnership as the organization scales in staff and geography.
How do you think having a diverse staff benefits organizations?
Researchers like Scott E. Page have shown that heterogeneous teams are best able to solve complex problems. Organizations like MENTOR seek to find lasting solutions to some of our most vexing societal challenges. These types of problems deserve the strength of ideas and the benefits of collaborating with people who can iterate and identify new ideas and concepts that can unlock meaningful solutions and positive impact that impact generations to come.
But this work to chart unknown territory requires all the stages of forming, storming, and norming to find alignment as a diverse body of ideas and practitioners. In this way, diversity is never a “nice to have.” It’s a requirement for us to act with the breadth and depth of perspectives and knowledge required to find solutions.
And to do the work of our partners — do something that no one has ever done before or chart unknown territory, it’s worth going through forming, storming, and norming as needed to find alignment and act as a diversity of ideas.
Jung Yun, Search Consultant
How long have you worked at Positively Partners? In what roles?
I’ve been with Positively Partners for just over three years. I started out as an outside consultant and became a full-time member of the Talent Recruitment team around two years ago. Since then, the firm has grown significantly — I was the second full-time hire on my team.
For some background: I came to the United States when I was 16. I didn’t speak much English at the time, and I went through four years of high school and then college as an international student. After college, I taught high school and then worked in admissions and international/BIPOC student support. I think my personal background and experience give me a good lens on recruitment.
Could you briefly explain how the recruitment process looks on your end? How do you work with organizations and candidates?
In my initial meeting with a hiring manager, I try to understand the organization’s needs in both the immediate and long-term future. For nonprofits in particular, every single hire has the chance to make a major impact on their team and to shift that team’s culture. I encourage clients to be transparent in job descriptions about things like compensation, workload, and work-life balance. I feel it’s really important for candidates to know what they’re applying for, and transparency helps create a more equitable application process and workplace.
A beautiful part of working with nonprofits is that their impact and mission statements really resonate with my own personal values as well as Positively Partners’.
How do you identify potential candidates who might not otherwise be part of your recruiting pipeline?
My background working with young people comes in there: I always see the possibility in people. Each job obviously requires specific skills, but I believe that with great training and mentorship, a wide range of people can find success in a role, especially in nonprofits where having mission alignment and a strong work ethic are key factors.
After identifying key competencies needed to be successful in the role through conversations with the hiring manager, I try to think as broadly as possible about how candidates with different backgrounds could fit the role in question. I provide hiring managers with a list of candidates who have a wide variety of backgrounds and qualifications and explain to them how different types of experiences could translate to the role. I get feedback ranging from, “This is great – I’d never thought about this type of candidate!” to, “I thought I’d get more people like (x).” I remind hiring managers that we aren’t looking for the “best” candidate; the ultimate goal is to identify someone who’s a great fit and who has the potential to grow with the organization.
Increasing access to certain types of roles is a key consideration in my work as well. I try to ensure I’m connecting with people who might not otherwise hear about the role or picture themselves in the position. A nice thing about working at Positively Partners is having clients who genuinely want diversity in their workforces – in terms of racial diversity, but also in terms of professional background and life experiences. I make a conscious effort to reach out to folks who might not be in a space where they’d hear about the role for which I’m recruiting and talk about how their skills could transfer to success in the position.
How do you feel Positively Partners has helped its clients to diversify their work environments?
The recruitment process is key. If organizations rely on “passive pooling,” where they post a job and see who applies, they’ll just get candidates who are already in their network or who are similar to their existing employees. We engage in active recruiting, where we use LinkedIn and other tools to find potential candidates and contact them to apply for the job. As a result, I’ve had successful candidates tell me, “I never would’ve heard about this job if you hadn’t reached out.”
How do you think having a diverse staff benefits organizations?
In terms of talent and recruitment, having a variety of people and experiences represented on an organization’s website is a better indication of their culture and their commitment to “walking the talk” than anything else. An organization can put up a 15-point DEI statement or share 50 documents from the DEI committee, but none of that will resonate as much as seeing employees who bring diverse experiences to the table. People want to join the team when they see that.
Ultimately, if you’re a social services or mission-driven organization, having representation on your staff means you have diverse perspectives when you’re making decisions and creating programs. It builds trust in your organization and benefits everyone.
Are you interested in doing or learning more? Take MENTOR’s Workplace Equity Pledge to further workplace equity for young people. Here are four actions you can take: 1. Advocate: Encourage your Congressional Representatives to support the Youth Workforce Readiness Act. 2. Learn: Watch MENTOR’s training on bringing a Mentoring Mindset to the workplace 3. Elevate: Download our resource on the power of workplace mentoring and share it with your company’s DEI committee. 4. Explore: Download our new resource. Becoming a Better Mentor: Strategies To Be There For Young People