You’re invited to the next installment of our Beyond Performative DEI Workshop Series:

Hire smarter and put your DEI goals into action.

Registration is currently closed.

We’ll be launching this series as an online, self-paced course soon.

Join our email list to hear when it’s ready!

Are you looking for a way to hire top talent that will help your company become more diverse, doesn’t waste time, and makes the rest of your HR processes more efficient, too?

We’ve got a hiring process that’ll help you with all of this and more – and we’re not talking about the answers you’ll find by Googling, “diversity hiring,” or, “best interview questions to ask candidates.” In this workshop, you’ll learn how to build a customized hiring process that leverages best practices, addresses implicit bias, and sets a strong foundation for achieving holistic DEI goals.

Because traditional “diversity recruiting” just doesn’t cut it.

I developed this hiring method while working as a recruiter for a five-person startup that previously had relied solely on personal referrals to find new staff. While the founders valued diversity conceptually, their company was 100% male and 0% underrepresented racial minorities. Plus, in their classic startup efforts to “build the plane while flying it,” their “hiring process” consisted of asking candidates questions that they’d been taught were good interview questions and then hiring them if they did well enough on a test and felt like a “culture fit.”

So I helped them build a new process that addressed their hiring challenges, resulting in significant growth and improved diversity.

I’ve since brought this process to many clients, across industries, whether to hire their second staff member or their 150th. I love seeing the relief and energy it brings people to finally have a framework that addresses so many of their hiring challenges in a clear and practical way. And it’s been so gratifying to see it enable clients to build more diverse teams in a way that feels aligned with their values, doesn’t require them to be robotic or anything less than their full selves, and that they can feel proud to talk about. So I’m delighted to have the opportunity to share this process with you!

Who is this workshop for?

Across industries and clients of all sizes, I find leaders who care about DEI facing common hiring challenges. So I build this workshop for supervisors, HR staff, people leaders, executives, talent acquisition staff, and hiring managers who:

  • Are struggling to increase diversity – especially representation of people from marginalized and oppressed groups – across your teams.

  • Are concerned that your staff sink too much of their scarce time into the interview process.

  • Want to help your hiring managers be more effective, fair, and efficient.

  • Want to bring on stronger hires and reduce your turnover rates.

What impact does this hiring process have?

After implementing this hiring method, past clients consistently report:

  • Higher demographic diversity across teams, with increased representation of staff from historically marginalized groups

  • Reduced time to fill for all open roles, with confidence that the time staff and candidates do invest in the process is happening in the most impactful places.

  • Everyone involved feels increased confidence in the hiring process – they know it’s fair and that it’ll bring in the most qualified people they can find for their roles

  • Improved candidate experience based on formal surveys and informal feedback.

  • More effective and efficient performance review processes (resulting from clearer up-front expectation setting and alignment), and lower turnover resulting from stronger hires.

Learn tangible tactics and methods for how to:

Reduce the negative impacts of unconscious bias throughout each step of your hiring process

Design strong rubrics for interviewers and interview candidates fairly and efficiently, while still building rapport and connection

Evaluate candidates for demonstrated alignment with your values instead of “culture fit” to build a stronger, more diverse, and culturally vibrant team where people truly enjoy working together

Determine the right qualifications for your open roles, and decide how best to assess for each of them

Conduct efficient interview debriefs, and resolve differences of opinion and conflicts that arise between decision-makers

Logistically implement this hiring method, either on its own or by layering into your existing Applicant Tracking System

Write compelling job descriptions that attract a strong and diverse candidate pool

Write stronger, more effective behavioral interview questions and design fairer, more effective skills assessments (and determine when to use which)

Champion the change management process as you roll out this new hiring framework across your organization

What will the workshops be like?

You’ll probably have fun!

We believe joy is a crucial part of effective DEI work, so you won’t find any stern lectures or shaming in these sessions.

You’ll build a community.

We love watching participants learn from each other and build connections that last long after the workshops conclude. To facilitate this, class time is highly interactive: you’ll have homework between sessions so that you can use class time to ask questions and engage instead of listening to long lectures.

You’ll grow and challenge your assumptions.

We create a space where you can ask hard or scary questions and get useful answers without judgment.

 “Natania brings a huge amount of experience and knowledge from many different industries to our work with her of building our hiring process. She has a wealth of useful source material and helps us put it in our own voice to make it work for our organization.

Learning this hiring process from her is also fun – even during difficult moments. She’s compassionate and non-judgmental, and her support makes this work feel so much easier.”

- Batya Levine, Director of Programs, Let My People Sing

Diversity: You want your teams to be more diverse – specifically, your organization and especially your higher level roles are filled with predominantly white, cis male, straight, able-bodied people and you want to bring in more staff from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups. Your efforts to do so thus far either haven’t yielded the results you hoped for.

Time to fill: Your hiring processes take way too long and are inefficient – candidates have to go through a million interview rounds, stakeholders whose opinions need to be respected in the process have a very long list of qualifications they’re looking for, people debate for a long time during debrief sessions, managers don’t realize until midway through the hiring process that they actually need a different type of candidate than they thought…staff time is drained and you’re losing good candidates in the process.

Unconscious Bias: You know unconscious bias is bad, and have tried to raise awareness of it on your teams, but aren’t sure what tangible, effective steps to take to actually reduce its impact on your hiring processes.

Turnover:  You often find that new hires don’t have what it takes to succeed in a role, so you see high rates of turnover and spend a lot of time managing underperformers. 

Weak Evaluations: You worry that you’re not evaluating for the right criteria, so you evaluate for as many criteria as you can think of to try to bring in stellar candidates.

Company Culture: You want to have (or maintain) a fantastic company culture, but you don’t know how to do that without evaluating people for “culture fit” (which you’ve heard is bad).

Are you struggling with any of these challenges?

Here are a few of the kinds of challenges this hiring process has helped our clients address:

Working with Natania has fundamentally changed our strategies and tools for finding the right people and helping them thrive in our company.  Already, we have a more diverse workforce, a rewarding work environment, and a tremendous soothing of some of the subtle dysfunctions that had plagued our teams before.” 

- Allan Platt, CEO, Clareo

“Natania's highly adaptable approach was ideal for our growing team, which more than doubled in size during our engagement. She improved our recruiting processes by aligning this work with our DEI goals, focusing on metrics to generate insights, and introducing new best practices to layer onto our existing ones without imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. This work not only helped our company become more diverse, but also made our team more inclusive.”

- Paul Joo, Co-Founder and COO, Summer

Sliding scale pricing

To make this workshop accessible to as many people as possible, we’re offering sliding scale pricing. Curious to learn more? We recommend this short overview from Radical History Club, as well as this explainer from Alexis J. Cunningfolk.

Your registration fee will grant you access to:

  • Four one-hour workshop sessions (with recordings if you can’t make it, and copies of all written materials covered for your reference) where you’ll learn everything you need to know to manage hiring processes that minimize bias and maximize success for your teams.

  • All the written materials you’ll need to implement this hiring process in your organization (either on its own or by layering into your existing Applicant Tracking System).

  • One 30-minute private coaching session with Natania to discuss your questions and the nuances of implementing your learnings in your organization.

What folks are saying about this workshop and hiring process:

The candidates I’ve used this hiring process with have said they enjoyed their interviews and felt so much more confident in them than other processes they’ve been through. And the process itself has brought us more cross-functional alignment internally, driving more value for the team and the business.

Regardless of whether my company keeps expecting us to continue using this hiring process, I'm going to take what Natania taught me to my next job, because it has made me so much better at hiring."

- Zach Seely, Director of Marketing and Communications, Sir Kensington’s

Natania helped me create an equitable hiring process for my first hire. As a result, I found and hired an amazing candidate in a way that was aligned with my values.

Not only do I now have the tools to use the process again in the future, but also the knowledge to lead an equitable hiring process AND create a more equitable workplace for the people I do hire.”

- Katie James, Founder, Storyroot

“Learning this hiring process with Natania is allowing us to put in the right up-front work to create a solid, values-aligned foundation we can work off of and build on for hopefully many hiring processes to come. She’s thorough, helps us translate our values into tangible processes, and is giving us the tools we need to do this work ourselves in the future.”

- Margot Seigle, Director of Organizational Transformation, Let My People Sing

Feel free to email us with any questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Nope. We’ve seen a lot of different “diversity recruiting” methods, and we’re often concerned about the harm we see these methods causing. (Read Natania’s blog post about why this term is harmful here.) This hiring process is designed to help you build more diverse teams (with a focus on increasing hires from marginalized groups), but the methods are different from what we see in the standard “diversity recruiting best practices” posts. That’s because we’re looking at your hiring process as a building block for success in your holistic DEI strategy work – not just a one-off initiative. After all, if you bring in a more diverse team but aren’t prepared to treat your new team members equitably so they feel included and supported to do their best work, you’re going to wind up causing harm and dealing with a costly turnover problem.

  • We have yet to find an industry where this hiring method isn’t helpful! We’ve used it in tech, higher ed, nonprofits, client services, startups, consumer packaged goods, even pieces of it for government agencies. If you’re concerned about whether this will work for your industry or organization, feel free to reach out and we can talk it through.

  • We’ve used it with organizations ranging from two employees (really) to thousands. Of course implementation looks different depending on whether your CEO is running it vs a member of a multi-team HR department, but we’ll work through those nuances together.

  • Do you want to learn a tangible method for hiring more effectively and efficiently in a way that’s aligned with your values and will help you build a more diverse team? Then yes! This workshop is designed to be most useful for folks who have some control over their organization’s hiring process. Usually that means supervisors, HR staff, executive/leadership team members, recruiters, etc. But if you want to learn this method, we’re happy to have you no matter what your formal role is!

  • Class is designed to be super interactive! We want you to have as much opportunity to learn from each other as well as ask the questions on your mind. To facilitate that, we’ll give you reading materials and assignments between sessions so we can make the most productive and engaging use of your class time.

  • That’s ok! All sessions will be recorded, so you can watch any that you miss before the next one and catch up with us.

  • Yep! We’ll give you some pre-work and homework between sessions so that (a) you can walk away from the class with a complete hiring plan for an open role, and (b) we can use our in-person time to address your questions as opposed to you silently working or listening to me lecture at you.

  • No two organizations are exactly the same, and we don’t believe in cookie cutter DEI solutions for anyone. So these coaching sessions are to help you customize this process to work best in your organization. If you need or want additional time beyond that, we’re happy to walk you through our advisory service packages.

Feel free to email us with any other questions or further clarification!

Who’s facilitating this workshop?

Hi, I’m Natania.

I’M HUMAN. As a white, Jewish, queer woman with invisible disabilities, I have an orientation to justice work that is informed by both my privilege and my marginalization. I’m California-born with a New York soul -- I meditate by doing jigsaw puzzles and am teaching myself to play ukulele. I’m a life-long learner and show up every day with my strengths and weaknesses in tow.

I'M A PRAGMATIST. I have a B.A. in Sociology from Vassar College and an M.B.A. in Organizational Behavior from the Yale School of Management. My institutional learning has taught me that there is valuable work to be done within our preexisting structures to set the foundation for long-term systemic shifts. Change will not happen overnight, but we can learn to live our values and challenge normalized inequities.

I'M DEDICATED. I am committed to progressive systemic change, and my activism practice is core to how I live my life. I volunteer and show up with organizations like Avodah, the Movement for Black Lives, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Swing Left. I’m hands-on, from crafting a sign to organizing in resistance.

I'M DETERMINED. For more than a decade, I’ve pushed to make workspaces safer, fairer, and more fulfilling, but I also know when I’m out of my lane. I model vulnerability and show there is strength in asking for help. When it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the truth is that I don’t know how to not do this work.