And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal and carceral podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d turn trans iliac. If you crossed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate with what’s coming. Hey Tony, here’s what’s coming. HR equity for non-HR professionals. Following last week’s HR overview, our panel focuses on equitable human resources. They take you through the employee life cycle from job description and your hiring process, through professional development and a career competencies map to growth and promotion, and you’ll find out why this is a Carsal podcast. They are Jenny Goldstein, organizational change consultant, and Brianna Marbury, CEO of Interledger Foundation. On Tony’s take too. Take the donor meeting. Here is HR equity for non-HR professionals. It’s a pleasure to welcome to nonprofit Radio, Jenny Goldstein and Brianna Marbury. Jenny believes that HR is a make or break driver of nonprofit outcomes. As an organizational change consultant, she works with leadership teams to shape efficient, inclusive organizations. She’s at Jenny Goldstein.com. Brianna Marbury is president and CEO of the Interedger Foundation. Stewarding the interledger protocol network that enables seamless, interoperable and inclusive financial transactions across currencies, platforms and borders. You’ll find the foundation at interledger.org. And Brianna on LinkedIn. Jenny, Brianna, welcome to nonprofit Radio. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I’m glad you’re both, I’m glad you’re both with us. Thank you. Um, Jenny, I have to ask, I’ve, I’ve never known a Jenny. I’ve, I know lots of gens and I know lots of Jennifers. You’re in the middle of the Jen Jennifer spectrum with, with Jenny. What’s right. It’s not, it’s not too common. How’d you, why’d you choose Jenny? I didn’t choose it. I was only a baby. But your birth name? Is your birth name Jenny? My birth certificate says Jenny, J E N N I E and the story is kind of neat. It’s an Ellis Island name actually. When my great grandmother came to this country, in the old country, she had a different name. When she got off the boat from Ellis Island to the big city, she was Jenny, and now I’m Jenny. So that was assigned by an Ellis Island officer. Is that, is that how it happened? Who knows? It’s actually very uncommon that we have a sort of a myth or an understanding that at Ellis Island, people were given new names with some frequency, and this is not true historically. Ellis Island was extremely accurate about getting people’s names right, so more likely she chose it. OK. Yes, I’ve heard those stories. I always wondered if they were true that names got changed. In the, in the Godfather, one of the Godfather movies, I think it’s the second one, his name is changed to the town that he’s from because the, the agent is not paying attention because there’s a line of 1000 people, immigrants behind him. Um, OK, so it’s chosen, it’s deliberate. Well, let’s go with that. All right. So, um, let’s see, Brianna, why don’t you help us, uh, understand the, the context between you and Jenny and, uh, give us an overview, please. I met Jenny when we both worked for an organization and it feels like a previous life and while both Jenny and I have left that organization, we still remained in contact. We’re still friendly. Um, Jenny actually helped me to get my current position right now, so it’s like connections of. Networks of networks and um I just find Jenny to be a delight to talk to. We had a call yesterday and I haven’t talked to Jenny. When we were both in New York, we would hang out and I haven’t seen Jenny in years and I miss seeing her and talking to her, so I’m I’m just very excited to be able to take this time to speak to you today about an area that Jenny has lots of expertise in. Uh rihanna’s being very modest, but I will say that we are doing your podcast, Tony, because we just want to hang out with each other. Right, yeah, you just don’t get together on Zoom often enough. All right. Well, Jenny, you could travel to Tampa where Brianna is. I would love to. Yeah, I mean, are you, are you near the water? I know that’s Gulf Coast. Are you near the water? Not, not unfortunately, no, but I have lots of trees around you enjoy being around trees. Please come down. There you go. Reunite, reunite in person, you know, the virtual only goes so far, really. Well, the thing is it only goes so far. 100%. But as so many of your listeners know, a lot of the time you show up at work and there actually is not an HR person and the person doing HR is doing it off the side of their desk based on some combination of what they’ve come to learn and their best instincts. And The thing about Brianna is that she’s not an HR person, as you stated in her bio. Her background actually is in finance, and we work so closely together because finance and operations, which ended up holding HR are such natural allies, and Brianna has some of the best. Insights and instincts when it comes to HR and particularly HR for equity of anyone I have ever worked with anywhere. So I think that we’re gonna have a lot of fun and hopefully come up with things that are really applicable right away because you don’t need to be an HR person to do a really good job with HR. Thank you for that. That’s wonderful and, and see how, uh, listeners know that they’re suffering under a lackluster and middling host because the guest provides the wonderful segue to the topic of HR. You, you can’t rely on the host for for much. Um, I am gonna make a suggestion, Jenny, cause we’re gonna, we’re gonna make some, uh, reels from this. Do you have to hold that little red marker? Do you have to hold that? OK. No, thanks. Absolutely. It’ll, it’ll help the presentation if the little, uh, if the, if the unerasable markers. All right, so. After that wonderful segue, um, all right, so then, Brianna, why don’t you lead us into the topic. Uh, this is non-HR practitioners, but we need to be conscious of, uh, Inequities in HR practices, even if we’re not an HR pro because as we know from last week’s show, lots of CEOs are cast into HR. Yes, we’re focusing on, uh, equity, so please give us, give us a better overview. Um, so I, I, I’ll take a step back and say when me and Jenny worked together, as we saw at the organization that we were at, a lot of nonprofits are started because they are passionate about one thing. Right? They’re passionate about the climate. They’re passionate about poverty and so people start an organization around that, but they don’t necessarily focus on operations in HR and the back end of the mission. And so it’s really important. to build that up as you’re building up the organization so that you don’t have to kind of backtrack once you’ve grown to a certain level to try to then think about equity. Um, I started at the Interledger Foundation 5 years ago when it was just 3 people, and now we’ve grown to 50 people around the world, including, um, and that is not including uh contractors. If you include the contractors who we work with on a regular basis. 100 people. And all along the way, we’ve had to really think about what what type of workforce do we want to be, and part of that is making sure that we include equity in everything that we do. Um, and so I, I think it. People need to understand what equity is versus equality because sometimes people conflate the two, and for that explanation, I’m going to toss it over to Jenny. We’re kind of taking over, Tony. OK, yeah, a little anarchy. All right, that’s that’s OK. Yeah, yeah, please. Jenny, Sure, uh. So, I will say first that the reason that HR matters for equity, uh, sometimes they’re seen as sort of separate things, like we have an HR practice, of course, we have to hire people, promote support or the accession them. And we have jargon on nonprofit. Oh, you are now. You say what was that word that you used earlier? What was that’s exactly right, Brianna. What podcast. Oh that’s that’s a bona fide. that’s, that means. Well, I’m I’m so I get I get. You Jenny has a podcast, she could put me in jail. No, so, um, I’m sure means fire, right? We could just does. It’s actually not really a term of art in the business. It just means. OK, thanks. You’re out. You’re parole. This is a highly podcast, Tony, look at you. I don’t know. I don’t even know what. I don’t know what carro means. What is the punishment for jargon jail though? Oh, she’s already out. No, it’s, uh, well, you know, you have to explain, you have to explain your term. I see. I mean, but decession, I don’t know, it’s just a little, it’s jargon. It’s jargon, not not right, but what’s How is, how is this the carceral wait before we go any further in HR, HR is becoming trivial now. What, what is carceral? Carceral, what is that? Why is this a relating to incarceration or the criminal legal system. Oh, relating to incarceration, you just made that up. Absolutely not. No, that is it’s bona fide. OK, it’s very good. All right, you said you love words. You’ve met your match. I do. I do love words. Uh, all right, maybe I have. OK, I do love words. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that. Use it 3 times and it’s yours. I remember that from, uh, that’s like we learned that, yes, it 3 times, use it in a sentence. All right. But, uh, so you were, uh, back to you before I, yes, before the uh host uh digressed you, we were talking about equity versus uh equality, right? OK. So, the short definition, equality is we’re going to treat everyone equally, equity is we’re going to treat people according to their needs. And so there’s a lot of similarity here, but it’s really about recognizing that uh. It can take some intention to actually establish a level playing field. Yeah, so basically, sometimes people don’t start at in the right place, right? So, say for instance, there’s a meme that’s around and it talks about um equity and it has um equality and it has where each student is given a stool. To look over the fence. But as you can see, everyone was not starting off from the same place. So equity means giving people a, a level up of what’s needed to be in the same on the same level. Because in that in that picture there the the. The kids looking over the fence are 3 different heights, so the, the, the equal height stool doesn’t serve like two of them, I think, or the middle one can barely see. OK, OK. So now, so Brianna, as president and CEO. Do you find yourself, you’re you’re in the, you’re in the senior HR role? I am not, well, ultimately the buck stops with me, so to speak, but um I I am not in the senior HR role. We do have an HR function which we’re very lucky to have, as you were talking about earlier, a lot of smaller nonprofits don’t have the luxury of having an HR department. And when we first started, we did not have an HR department. So a lot of people have to take on a variety of roles, uh, when they’re working for smaller nonprofits. Um, and so, yes, I’m not in that role, but I deal a lot with HR. Something I would ask you, Brianna, is when did you make the choice to make an investment in professional HR? When did you professionalize in the life cycle of the organization? So as we started to grow, and I think that we were. Probably around 15 employees or so and it began taking up a considerable amount of time as we had planned on growing even more and doing a lot of searches. um I didn’t have time. We had an operations person but we did not have an HR person. um I didn’t have the time for that. I didn’t know what the rules or regulations were for the various states that we were working in. I didn’t know about the compliance that we had to do in other regions because we have people from all over the world and I recognized that I was probably not the best person or wasn’t a best a good use of my time to continue focusing on HR because I had so many other things to focus on and why not we have the budget for it, why not hire someone whose sole purpose is looking at HR all day every day. Right, as, as you grew to, you said roughly 15. OK, makes sense. Uh, and then outsourcing, of course, is a possibility too, like at first. We outsourced the HR function at first, and then once we grew even more, it’s like, OK, we need to bring this in-house, uh, to get someone who’s able to. Um, understand what our needs are and not just a, a consultant who we get on the line when we call our um outsourced uh HR person. And so after we grew to about maybe 30, then we got a dedicated HR person. I will say as an outsourced HR person, because the work I do now is organizational change consulting, and so much of the time, what that looks like is a leadership team saying, we’re a little over our skis at this point. And maybe we know what we need and maybe we don’t, but we know we need something, and they’ll find me, and this is work that I am super passionate about doing now. A lot of what I do is to say, what does it take for you to stop calling me? Right? Because I love you and I want you to keep calling me, but ultimately it’s not the most sustainable choice for you to manage your own resources to keep paying someone. So maybe you need a better human capital management system. Do you have a human capital management system? Do you know what that is? Is there an intersection between price and efficiency that’s actually gonna work for you? A ton of the work I do is, what’s the technology that’s going to support you? And the reason that’s really an equity play is that the technology. Kind of forces us into a level of. Uh, repeatability, standardization, data informed decision making, that can be super helpful when the other option is we’re not tracking how many days off anybody is taking in the organization. We don’t really have a mechanism to track that and so we’re not seeing. That in fact, these individuals or these teams are putting in way more days than these other teams. So you’re starting to lead into it. Excellent. So let, let’s let’s be explicit about some of the inequities that you see in HR, Jenny. Oh my gosh, there’s so many. Well, let’s let’s, we have an hour together. Well, we don’t have an hour left, but we have, we have time. So let, let’s let’s talk about some of the major ones that are most likely to be. Pervading That’s not a bad word, pervading. That’s not too bad. It’s, it’s not as good as it’s not as good as, see, I already forgot the word that you that’s was it? No, it was. It’s not as good as, um, that may be pervading small and mid-size nonprofits, and we’re not even aware of some of these HR. Inequities that we’re, we’ve created, we’re perpetuating, we, we don’t even know. So please break down, break out a few. All right, if you’re listening to this, blink twice when you hear one that’s happening in your organization or is happening to you. We’ll start with looking at the employee life cycle, right? So first, as an organization, we say we gotta bring somebody in, we’re gonna hire somebody. What’s the job that they’re being asked to do? Who wrote that job description? How did they write the job description? How explicit is the job description in saying, this is what’s required to do the job. And we’ve actually kicked the tires and we know that those are the real skills. For example, do you need a certain diploma to do this job, or is that just sort of a preference or a tradition? Uh, do you need to be a good writer? Right? One of the things that I’ve learned. As I’ve matured in the work is that I no longer care about grammatical mistakes or typos and cover letters, if that’s not what the job is about. I was brought up that professionalism looks like you don’t have any mistakes. Right, but a lot of the time that’s actually not reflective of what is gonna be required in the job, and that can be a real barrier to equity because we know that not everyone is receiving the same education or is writing in their native language. And so if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter and we should be honest and straightforward about that once you’ve written your job description. And there’s so much more, right? Did you, I wanted to add something gracious gracious. So we’ll come back. We’re gonna tick off. I want to add to Jenny’s point about how the job description because what you find with a lot of people of color and women is they self. Deselect, right? So they might see one thing in a line of 15 or 20 and decide that they don’t meet those qualifications that that particular qualification, even though they might qualify for uh everything else. They’ll deselect. So you have to really be very specific about what you want to do and leave off the, well, you can put put them as nice to haves but not necessarily necessary for the job. Sorry back to Jenny. Totally and to build on that, you’ll often see in job descriptions now, we encourage you to apply even if you do not feel that you meet all of the criteria and that’s a direct response to the research that has told us that women and people of color are less likely to apply if they feel they don’t meet all the criteria than white men. But is that what is it? Can we drill down on that? What do we know why why that is? Why, if you, if you are if you meet 95% of the criteria, but you’re missing one, like one, why, why is a woman or a person of color less like like this is not a scientific answer at all. This is just an answer based on my own experience. Um, I know that if I look at it, I, I’m already feeling apprehensive about applying for a job in the first. Place and so if I don’t see that I meet all of these things I’m like why would they pick me when they probably have someone else that’s lined up why waste my time? Why waste their time? And I had a colleague years ago tell me just apply for it. Women always do this to themselves, just apply for it and have them tell you whether you want to qualify or not. Even for this position. Jenny, if you did not send, if they did not have such a short description of what the job was, I would not have applied to it. I would that I was not qualified. You’re talking about the job that you’re in now. Correct, yes. OK. Thanks, Brianna. All right. Uh, Jenny, you want, anything you wanna add to that or you wanna just uh continue with our With our in I said Brianna nailed it. OK, let’s let’s identify. Oh, well, we’re talking about job descriptions, job postings. I’ve heard it. I’d like to hear for listeners, uh, again, and for me too, salary ranges. In jobs they belong. What they don’t, they don’t belong. They belong. I guess I’ve heard it. Yeah, they do belong. No, they do belong. You’re supposed to put salary ranges, right? People should know what the, what the ranges are of the, of the job, right? In some states you are legally obligated. And even if you’re not, you should. Because it saves you time and it saves the applicant time because no way do you want people applying and you’re reading through their application, and they get through the process, they’ve put in time, you’ve put in time and then you find out there’s not a match on the salary expectations. Why would anybody want that? It’s bad for everyone. Yes, I, I can, I have a funny story about that. So we were hiring a person and they had come to me, by the time they come to me, it was the 3rd interview and I said, Hi, how are you doing? Welcome, you know, thanks for taking time out to speak to me. Uh, what interests you about the job? And her first question was, what’s the salary range for this job? I was like, I’m sorry, excuse me? She’s like, I’ve been through 3 interviews now and I have no idea what the salary range for it, for it was. Like, ultimately, of course, we did not pick her, but she could have been perfectly capable of doing the job, but she was already very frustrated by the process. And that’s a kind of a de-selection of self deselection by yelling at the person who’s interviewing them about the salary range. There was a, yeah, there was a more subtle way of asking that exact same question, not, not out of the gate, probably in the, in the interview. All right. I promise that we’ll move on from job descriptions, but I can’t let it go by without saying that when you’re hiring. I think there is a moral obligation to remember that you are in a position of power over every person who applies. And it is incumbent upon you to use words that you might like, Tony, to use that power carefully. So, for example, what are you asking of people’s time? Are you sending them? A friend of mine just got asked for a final round interview. Can you give us a 20 minute presentation with slides on the following things that are completely unique to our organization? And they were like, and it should take, you know, like an hour for you to put this together. What? Are you crazy? 6 hours. And she said, you know, I did it, but I’m gonna be really upset if I don’t get it, and frankly really upset if I do get it because who are these people who think that this is an appropriate way to begin an employment relationship. I hope they’re not listening and I hope they don’t know who they are. Did she? She did get the job and I’ve been working with her over the past week to say, now is the time for you, because now the power dynamic has changed a little bit, right? Now she’s she’s she’s inside. And now it’s time to teach them. These are the boundaries around how you treat me. That was OK when I was a candidate because I didn’t have another choice. But now that I’m an employee, I want things to look different. How much better would it be if we didn’t put people in that position as candidates in the first place and they didn’t come in with their guard up thinking my new place of employment is kind of the enemy. Yeah, that’s that’s an outrageous. I do a PowerPoint. Um, we’re not moving on quite yet from uh job descriptions even though uh our host Jenny Goldstein would like to move on. Goldstein. It’s like Frankenstein. What did I say? Did I say steam? I’m sorry. Goldstein, Goldstein. I knew that. All right, well, obviously I didn’t learn it. I didn’t learn it like I learned Carsero. All right, I’ll I’ll, I’ll know it. I’ll know it for the end. It’s time for Tony’s take too. Thank you, Kate. I’m talking about something that I posted on LinkedIn this week. That you, you don’t need a lot of donor data. In order to take a meeting with a donor or a prospect. Yeah, I sometimes hear, well, I don’t, you know, I don’t have enough information about the person, so I’m not ready to meet with them yet. We need more research. I don’t agree. The best way to find out about somebody is to go meet with them. You find out what you need to know firsthand. Right, right from their mouth, it’s not some secondhand database or some, you know, set of assumptions that lead to a, a giving analysis or, you know, a likelihood or a propensity or, you know, uh, an approximate giving value that they have. You can get the information you need. You don’t, you don’t need to know how much real estate they own or whether they have a boat in order to take a meeting. That, that’s, that’s an unnecessary hesitation. The best way to learn about folks. is talking to them plus. This is the way to start to build solid relationships that are gonna last. You’re not gonna build any relationships pouring over a wealth screening. So, my advice, you don’t feel like you have enough information? Get more information Take the meeting. That is Tony’s take too. Kate Or maybe you can meet them on the boat. Well, yeah, right. If they invite you to their boat, there’s a data point. We’ve got Beaucoup but loads more time. Here’s the rest of HR equity for non-HR professionals with Jenny Goldstein and Brianna Marbury. Now, see, now I, I digress myself and then I, yes, because I just saw a post on LinkedIn this morning. It had a job just, uh, uh, someone was, uh, posting about this job description that they had seen where the salary range was 3x. It was like 55,000 to 155,000. And the point was, you know, that’s worthless. That well Brianna, all right. I can’t wait to hear you defend this. So it depends on what your geographic location is, right? So if you’re hiring within the United States, that that commands one salary range. But if you’re hiring worldwide, it becomes very difficult, um, and that’s why I will say in our um job descriptions, depending on Location. So, uh, you know, 155,000 in New York is not the same as 155,000 in, say, Mumbai, India. So you, you really have to go and I don’t know where the job the the excuse me, the job description that you were looking at, um, where they were open to as far as location, but sometimes it’s really hard and if you want to take it in context of the United States, 155,000. Um, in New York is not the same as 155,000 in like Holland, Michigan. Right, OK, uh, yeah, so the, the, um, the qualification around location that that I could that’s certainly valuable. Um, the, the point of the post was that they didn’t seem to know the, the, the company didn’t seem to know. What they really wanted, like 55,000 sounds like entry level and 155 sounds like you’re at least managing someone if it’s not senior, you know, if it’s not senior leadership, um, uh, uh, but even so, Brianna, I mean, I pushed back a little bit, you know, like 3 X. I don’t know. I mean that’s a bit extreme. That is a bit extreme. you’re talking about within the United States, not necessarily if you’re talking about someone who is in. Uh, an underdeveloped abroad, abroad, right, OK. I think there are a lot of better ways to do that. And One of them is to say, this is our published internal salary range. If you come, like we actually don’t know if we’re looking for someone at a more junior level or a more senior level. So our salary ranges for entry level begin at X and um. At at a higher level of seniority, begin at Y or something like that. Like maybe there’s more information you can offer, or maybe you say in a major metropolitan area of the United States, our salary range begins at X for this role. Uh, depending on location, the numbers may change. Just whatever information you can share because I do think that, uh, we’re all taught that knowledge is power, and especially in a hiring process, we kind of try to give away as little as we can. I think there’s an instinctive bias to holding information back, and I really love to challenge that and say, like, why don’t we just tell people everything we know. Well, you have something that brings us then we are going to move on from job description. I think that brings us back to the original point that it sounds like this company needs to do a little bit more work and what they want out of that position. And, and that was, that was the point of the post, they didn’t really know what they wanted. All right. All right, uh, host Jenny. Jenny Goldstein, uh, you want to move us along now? I should love to. So we run our hiring process inequities we’re talking about inequities, right? So we’ve run our hiring process, we got through it, we brought someone in. We need to onboard them. What does that look like? Is it a formalized process or not? Or is it like, please shadow this other person and you’ll learn from them. That is, by its nature inequitable because the comfort that different people feel with asking questions. will be different, right? Or what they, uh, how someone relates to them. I think the one of the best things you can do for equity is to say, this is sort of the minimum standard that we expect, and we are going to document it and make it repeatable and verifiable. By the way, really good way to protect yourself against like an EEOC complaint. Uh, which does happen even in smaller organizations. Someone can say I wasn’t treated properly and you really want as an organization to be able to say, here’s the documentation on our onboarding process or our hiring process or our performance management process, so we can show you that actually we do treat everybody the same. If your onboarding process is we’ll set up a couple of meetings for you and like please ask any questions, you’re gonna lose that EOC complaint. OK. Um, Brianna, you should be thinking of some inequities as well as I, I asked Jenny for one more and then, and then we’ll come to you because I know there, I’m sure there are many, so that we’re not, that we’re not conscious of. Jenny, give us, give us one more before Brianna goes. One more. I’m gonna think about a good one. Jenny I’ll tell you about my pocket. Um, so sometimes with around career development, um, there are inequities whether there’s no direct like clear path for a person to grow. Uh, a lot of nonprofits might not have if they’re smaller, might not have a professional development fund. So you have to really be creative in how you develop your people. So that could mean um having people switch out roles and who’s presenting, say, at a conference or uh finding. Your mentorship with people at other organizations of the places where they’re interested in in going. So sometimes people think we’re a small nonprofit. There’s nothing that we can do to help promote equitable growth with our staff, but in those cases you just have to get really creative with what you do. Absolutely. Jenny, did you think of something else, OK. Thank you, Brianna, reminded how much I like then we’ll we’ll talk about some solutions. Go ahead, please. So we’ve, we’ve hired our person, right? We went through the hiring process, they’ve onboarded, they’re thriving. It’s been a little while. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about career growth. Brianna talked about how do we, uh, give people exposure to the skills or opportunities that help them grow. But maybe they want to grow internally to the organization, and that is a place where we do see a ton of inequity, because if you don’t have documented career paths. It’s not gonna be clear to folks, when should I expect to get promoted? Am I responsible for advocating for myself around promotion? What are the possible paths to promotion? Do I need to become a manager or can I remain an individual contributor who’s not a manager and in fact, is just becoming more of an expert in this one particular field? One thing I love doing with organizations, and it sounds hard, and it really isn’t. If you’re talking about solutions, I think this is a really important one. It’s great for morale and it’s great for equity. Create a career competencies map and share it out. That just means if you’re doing advocacy, then you could be doing it as an entry level, you could be, um, in the middle, or you could be at the top. And these are the skills we expect to see and If you’re not in advocacy, but in fact, you’re in legal services or whatever it is, this is what those roles look like. If you Google competency map, career competencies, you’ll find tons of examples. The management center has great examples and worksheets to get into it. And that means that I, as an employee can look and say, ah, this is what’s available to me in terms of my growth. Now I can have a kind of apples to apples conversation like anybody else and go to my manager and say, I’m interested in this, and I see that this is what I would need in order to get there. Let’s come up with ways that I can develop that experience, because if you don’t make it clear what those possibilities are, and you don’t present a standardized sort of range of possibilities or next steps, you’re 100% gonna see some people moving up more quickly and other people not, and I bet you that there will be some common demographics in those groups. OK, that the natural extension of what Brianna just proposed made us aware of in terms of professional development competencies. Um, what’s the, what’s the resource that you mentioned, the management center? Is that a, is that a free resource for HR? The management center does paid trainings, which are great, but they also have a huge online library of resources, particularly for equity and nonprofits that I really recommend. Management Center.com. Probably.org. OK. Thank you. I love, I love free and low-cost resources for our listeners. Thank you. Um, All right, so, I mean, we, we’re kind of, as we’re talking through some of these inequity issues, we’re kind of hinting at how to do it better. You’re, you’re, you both, you both just, but let’s be more intentional about. Being unbiased, being equitable, uh, what, what. I mean, OK, raising consciousness, that’s. Essential. You need, you need to know what you’re, what you’re mishandling, what, what could be what needs to be improved. How do we start to make some of these improvements? Anybody. Um, so I think going back to the hiring process, uh, it should be standardized and so every, every person is asked the same question. And sometimes if you’re uh in a smaller organization, you don’t necessarily have a standardized process for hiring. It could be, hey, I, I know this person or pull in a person, come to this interview, but they are not a complete set of questions that you’re asking each candidate, so each person might get a different read um from the interview based on how they felt at the time. So you should definitely have a a process that you take the candidates through to make it more equitable. So, so this is a case where Treating everyone equally, you’re saying is equitable. Giving everyone a chance to answer the same questions. Yes, asking all the same, OK, OK. You have another one you want to throw something else? We don’t have to like play ping pong with the, you know, Jenny and then you and then Jenny and then you go ahead you have something else? Related to that. Oh sorry, Brianna. No, no, no, go ahead. Related to that hiring process, decide what your hiring process is going to be in advance and put it in the job description. That means write down our hiring process is submit a resume and work sample. Then you’ll be asked to do a 15 minute phone screen. The next step will be a half hour interview with the hiring manager, and the last step will be a 45 minute interview with a panel of prospective peer colleagues. You left out the PowerPoint slides. You know what? Feel free to leave that one out. Yeah, that one. No, that’s an interesting one. That’s interesting because we don’t have, we don’t have that, but we try to give people what the next steps are. I think at least in the first interview, if you lay out what the process is going to be, which that’s probably something that we can improve on. We try to go to next steps, but we definitely don’t have that um in our job descriptions currently, and that might be something to consider including. Thank you for that tip, Jenny. You are welcome. So that’s the way Jenny, look, like free, free consulting, I mean your friends and your friends anyway she wouldn’t, she would have given you the friends and family discount anyway for the um but no, yeah, so I’ve never, I’ve never seen that with it. So, but again, so this is interesting because that’s a, that’s a standardization. So we’re, we’re, we’re making clear that everybody’s gonna be treated equally. Around in certain, in certain ways, everybody gets the same process. Everybody gets the same Brianna, you’re saying everybody gets the same interview questions and so that I mean that that really that. It’s great in that everyone gets the same process because if, say, for instance, hey, I know Jenny from before, let her go through the process. Let’s skip these steps, and that’s not equitable to the other person that is interviewing for the job. Yeah. And I think what happens without standardization, because I hear what you’re saying, this tension between equality and equity, and is it treating people the same or treating them according to their own circumstance? In this case, if we don’t have standard process, what we see in organizations is a distinct sort of experience for each person according to whether we think we need to have an extra interview with them, or do we just have a good sense that they’ve got the skills to do the job? We don’t need to do that extra interview. And the reality is that the people we get a good sense about, quote unquote, are probably people who look like us, who have a similar background to us, a similar educational formation. And it’s not helping anyone really to have those uh unique or one off. Processes. Can I add one more reason why though, it’s really helpful to publish in advance, and this is really for you if you are like working in a nonprofit and you’re just trying to like get through this. You don’t have a big team. That’s our listeners. Yeah, that’s, I hope so. Again, blink twice. The If you’re trying to run a hiring process, guaranteed, someone from higher up is gonna suddenly get interested in your hiring process at some point before you make an offer, and they’re gonna say, but wait, I haven’t spoken to the candidate, and you’re gonna say, But I asked if you needed to be involved and you said no. But now you think you do because this is something we often see with leadership, nonprofit leaders, I love you, and until it’s urgent, maybe it doesn’t seem important to get involved, then you’re like, well, we’re gonna hire this person, I need to get involved. Adding in extra steps. I’ve certainly run hiring processes where we start adding in extra steps, and a person who thought they were about to get a job offer is suddenly like waiting an extra month. And not everyone has an extra month. Maybe they’ve got another offer, maybe they need to make some choices. I, I think that, uh, it’s helpful to you as the employee doing the hiring just as much as it’s helpful for. The candidate to say this is gonna be the process. The process is locked, like please bless it and sign off on it because we’re not adding in extra rounds of consideration later. I’ll tell you one more little personal detail and we’re making it, we’re making it public. We’re we’re making it to the job posting, OK, yeah. Um, I was once told in final stages of an entering of an interview process that I, they just weren’t sure about me because I lacked gravitas. And gravitas is insulting, it’s very insulting, uh, and it’s full of bias, isn’t it? Because what do we associate gravitas with? We associate gravitas with men. And to be told, you don’t seem like you have the the sort of presence and uh seriousness or seniority to meet our expectations for this role. Is Not only unhelpful, it’s, it’s it’s offensive and discriminatory, right? So, writing down the process and having your rubric, this is how we’re evaluating candidates means when someone says, but I wanna make sure they have gravitas, you can say, well, what is that? And let’s define it as something that’s actually accessible to any candidate and is not discriminatory and We won’t end up in these like later stage conversations we’re trying to figure out like how do we assess for something we didn’t know we needed in the first place. Did you not get that job? No, I did. You got the job even though you lacked gravitas in their opinion, yeah, because I Asked questions about the purpose of gravitastas. So this is really interesting. So were they in the process of telling you you didn’t get the job? No, they were saying we’re we’re still in the interview process. Right, OK. They hadn’t chosen a candidate, but they were telling you that. You were not lack gravitas. And what does it mean to you? Uh, we’ll see this is an organizations that serve a particular and have a sort of historic expectation that their employees come from that. So for example, we’re a Jewish communal organization and most of our employees are Jewish. We’re a Catholic nonprofit and a lot of our employees are Catholic and this is sort of a tradition and so now we have to try to come up with ways to code, what are we actually legally able to look for in a candidate that’s not like, do you know the catechism? Or like, do you have Uh, often what that ends up looking like in a job description is cultural competency or a familiarity with X community. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? You might be working with formerly incarcerated people and say we have a preference for people with lived experience in the criminal justice system. Sure, OK, but you just have to be able to defend why. Um, I think we, we’ve talked a lot about, um, the hiring process, but what about people who are already hired? So how do you everything’s perfect for them. There’s going to be, chances are if you do uh a salary audit or which you should every couple of years, you’re going to find some disparities, whether it’s across gender, you know, race, tenure, whatever, um, and so. So you have to ask yourself, how can you address these gaps. If you don’t have the resources to do a um compensation study from an outsourced uh person like Jenny, uh, internally, you can also just Put all those things in a spreadsheet and I bet there’s a good chance that you’re going to find that someone who is in an underrepresented group is is being paid underpaid and Brian, your compensation audit, you’re looking at a lot of different variables. Yes, you’re looking at gender, race, location, role, tenure. Yes, I’ve seen staff members uh create self-reported compensation studies where they just ask their colleagues to anonymously put in their demographic info and their salary information. I don’t know that. That’s the only way to go. It’s a little bit combative. It’s really a position that says, I don’t think leadership is moving in the right direction in terms of conducting their own salary audit, making sure that they’re paying everyone fairly and transparently. We can talk more about equal pay for equal work and whether that is equitable later, but the, the DIY approach can work, especially if it’s within a smaller team. I just want to know if everyone who’s working with me in. Direct service case management is making the same money. Like, well, let’s just the team. I worked for an organization. It was still a nonprofit, and they did not want you to discuss salary. And why? Why are you so adamant about keeping these people? So yeah, it, it definitely some, some suspected disparities going on there. Brianna, was that something that that they just said. Uh, without any reason or because something was like a brewing yeah, someone was asking about a salary. They wanted an increase and they revealed that I know that my colleague is making this much and so it was said like you do not discuss salaries. It’s like. Yeah, what are you what are you trying to hide? Yeah. I will note for the listener that in the United States, you have a legal right to discuss or disclose your own salary. So, oh well, yeah, your, your own, but not to, you know, I mean, you can ask other people theirs and they have the right to tell you. Right, so but the yeah, they can’t tell you that you can’t tell other people what you make. OK, thank you. Let’s talk more about the folks who are already hired and uh inequities and, and how to resolve them. Who’s got something else? Come on. There must be. I mean, I know there’s multiple. What else is going on out there, Jenny? Oh, I’ve got a whole like cheat sheet of tips on my website for anyone who just wants to like get the quick, easy hits of how do we address inequity in the organization. OK, so let’s start with that. Where do we start? We go to Jenny Goldstein.com and then where do we go after that? Uh, you’ll just see a resources tabs, OK, yeah, it’s not such a big website that you’re really gonna have a hard time. I didn’t, I didn’t want to presume that I that that it was simple. OK. He’s one thing I really love. I beg your pardon. I was just trying to give you another shout outsources at Jenny Goldstein.com. Goldstein. Jenny Goldstein.com. I have 3 minutes to get it right. I’m trainable. I, I, I got. I just, uh, Goldstein. Go to Jenny Goldstein.com and check the resources tab for a list of what again? Uh, free templates and little guides for things you can do as an employee to create more equity in your nonprofit. OK, we’re we’re, I guess we are wrapping up. Yeah, we’re coming? Sure, you have a technology budget at your organization, I promise you do, and There is a lot of good tech that is also improving at a very rapid clip that can really make a difference in driving equity. There’s a lot of human capital management systems, HR information systems, PEOs, etc. There’s all these different tools that start with essentially a payroll function and kind of build out from there, and they will do the work for you on providing. Resources for growth, on giving you data on uh demographics and any potential hotspots. Um, they’ll make it easy for you to stay compliant, you don’t have to worry about it. One way I get a lot of clients, unfortunately, is that they fall out of compliance. With some state or entity without realizing it and then they’re like, oh crap, we have to fix this. The right technology partner will prevent that from happening and it will save you money. I know you had Amy Sample Ward on very recently for the state of the sector, uh, nonprofit technology conference and N10. Those are great resources for learning more or you know, Jenny Goldstein.com. Well, I’m not gonna, all right, I’m not gonna give another shout out because you just did, but uh N10 is 10 is where you and I met. Uh, it’s perfect. So you, you ended Brianna Star us, Brianna Marbury, you’ll find the uh the foundation at interledger.org. You can connect with Brianna on LinkedIn, which I will do. I hope you don’t turn me down. Thank you. Um, all right, thank you, Jenny, Brianna, thank you for joining this Carroll podcast. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. It’s fun. Thank you. I’m glad. is excellent. I’m glad. Thank you. Yeah. Next week, the new tax law, what it means for end of year and 2026 fundraising with Russell James. OK, so we’re supposed to have had that this week, but I just, I couldn’t schedule Russell James. He’s a very popular guy. So we’re delayed a week. But this way the two HR episodes come back to back. You see how this works out. Last week was HR overview. This is because HR equity. These things don’t just happen. Although this time it did just happen because Russell James wasn’t available, but usually it doesn’t just happen. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.