Include the salary range.

Make a commitment to show salary ranges for every position at every level of your organization. This is equally as important for C-suite employees as it is for associate level, since associate levels are often new to the workplace and may not feel empowered to negotiate. Including the salary range on a job posting is your organization’s evidence of a commitment to transparency, trust, and equity. When a job posting doesn’t include a salary range, it raises many red flags for prospective employees and they may be discouraged from applying. By sharing a salary range, you’re inspiring trust in your future employees and recognizing that transparency with employees (future--and current ones who may read this as well) improves motivation, loyalty, and performance.

At the same time, you’re acknowledging the nuanced process that is connecting job seekers with employment and helping people to find a healthy, appropriate match. Of course, including a salary range helps facilitate fair and equitable negotiations between employers and job seekers, especially for women and people of historically underrepresented communities such as Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Asian Americans, Latinx, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups that have faced discrimination. It also allows candidates to self-select and creates a more exacting candidate pool - one that is likely to produce a candidate who says yes to a first offer. Today, we see a change across the United States and Canada toward pay transparency, honoring that salary ranges must be visible on job postings and advertisements in 21 states and 21 localities and growing. And don’t forget, New York City based organizations, May 15 is quickly approaching! May 15 is the date on which the NYC pay transparency law goes into effect, requiring all employers with four or more employees to post salaries for all jobs. That includes all of our national Jewish organizations based in New York as well. We don’t yet know that this guarantees equity for all, but we know that it’s a helpful start in the right direction.

As an added bonus, including the salary range on a job posting, guarantees both employers’ and prospective employees’ time is used most efficiently by streamlining hiring and filtering out candidates who are not a match. Employers, you deserve an effective process. Posting a salary range at this stage of your hiring process builds in a mechanism for screening candidates who are not the right salary match, and enables you to save effort and energy at the same time. Clarity helps, and the messages that this sends about your process and about your values is an invitation to prospective employees to consider joining your organization.

Looking for resources, language and more? Visit our Salary Range Transparency Toolkit. And if we don’t yet have what you need, drop us a line. We’re in the process of developing a new suite of tools and resources, and we’d love to hear what will make your work easier and more equitable.

Start with your job posting.

As an employer posting a job, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Perhaps the original context (thanks, Head and Shoulders!) feels a bit dated or gendered, but we know that when we examine the texts of job postings, a wide variety of cognitive biases are triggered and may impact whether or not we apply to a position. Below are some suggestions for how to make these postings more equitable:

• Proofread your job postings for gendered language, social constructs, emotional responses, and questionable legal language. Examples: “Our ideal candidate fosters learning, growth, kindness, and community” uses language that is typically understood as feminine. “Entrepreneurial, dynamic, and with strong writing skills” uses language that is typically understood as masculine.

• Make sure that what you’re including is measurable and concrete. Example: “We are seeking an enthusiastic and creative Director of Jewish Learning”: How will you measure or assess your candidates for enthusiasm and creativity?

• Ensure that the job posting is directed to your prospective employees and describes the position’s responsibilities, not just the goals of your organization. Advertisements that talk just about the organization and their goals lose out on describing their ideal candidate and engaging with prospective employees.

• Make sure the job posting is inviting and exciting: write something that will energize applicants, and make them enthusiastic about the prospect of joining your team or organization.

• Recall the distinction between a job posting or advertisement and a job description. Postings or advertisements are written to convey clear information about the position, intended to understand the essential framework for the role and the broad scope of the position. These job postings should not be exhaustive lists of competencies, responsibilities, qualifications, or expected outcomes and outputs associated with a position. Make sure that you distinguish between an advertisement for an open position and a job description that might later be appended to a letter of hire or a contract that describes a person’s full scope of work and obligations.

Short, clear job postings invite candidates to apply for open positions and excite them about the prospect of joining your team. Lengthy job descriptions, which might be left over from a previous employee or include content geared toward performance management, may share more about the organization than about the actual position. Recognize that a job posting is only one small part of the larger hiring process, too. These should be an open door to further dialogue, and yours should be that opportunity to invite in as wide a network of potential candidates as possible.

Join us for a workshop, request a consultation on writing equitable job postings, or if you’re a member of our Gender Equity Advocates Network, access our Equitable Hiring Checklist as part of our emerging Equitable Hiring Resource Bank.

Jewish Organizations: as you know, hiring is BACK. We’ll be piloting our new hiring workshop on excellent and equitable job descriptions this fall. Your job descriptions can be better. In fact, they can be more than better, they can be both excellent and equitable, and can get the best candidate hired. We’ll be working with 3-5 organizational teams who are joining us in a design experiment grounded in our original job description workshops. While we closed out our initial cohort on April 1, if you are interested in being an alternate, drop us an email and we’ll let you know if there’s extra room for your organizational team of 2-3 people info@genderequityinhiringproject.org.

Hiring on Purpose: Principles for Equitable Hiring, and narrowing the gender leadership gap, too.

Getting Started:

Want to immediately improve your chances of hiring equitably?

Consider some of these steps to get you started.

Think back to your last time applying for a new job. What was the experience like for you? How did the initial interview make you feel? Did you have to wait long to hear something back? How many rounds of interviews did you experience? Over how many weeks or months was the process? What was your mindset; were you nervous? Confident? Excited? Filled with dread?

You as an employer have the power to make the hiring process a positive experience for yourself and for job seekers. You also have the power to shift the process from one that is inherently inequitable to one that embraces fair treatment every step of the way. We’re pleased to offer you (in our new blog) our first series of posts, over the course of the next 14 weeks, filled with concrete ideas, recommendations and practices to help you hire equitably, effectively, and respectfully.

We hope that reading and engaging with our blog and the content inside will encourage you to think differently about your hiring and employment process. While our recommendations are aimed toward employers, it will take all of us--employers, job seekers, employees, lay leaders, and other community members--to meaningfully change how we hire. So, regardless of your current role and relationship to hiring, we hope you will read and wrestle with these concepts.

We hope you will be inspired to take action, and are supported in doing so. Our series Hiring on Purpose includes clear recommendations and reflective questions that may inspire you to question current practice, disrupt the systems in which you live, work, and strive, even if incrementally, toward change. Read on here for the next number of weeks to consider how we might hire better, and hire with and on purpose.

Think again about the last time you applied for a new position. What emotions do these memories bring up? What went well? What made you feel appreciated, validated, or supported? What made you feel frustrated, discouraged, or angry? Let’s note where we feel discomfort--or appreciation--and use the power in our awareness to shift hiring and employment processes in our workplaces from ones that are often profoundly misguided toward ones that are more equitable and truly strive toward fair and dignified treatment for all. We invite you to join us in this work. Get ready for more...and keep your browser pointed right here. We'll see you next week.

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