Moving Beyond Business as Usual: Antiracist Recruitment and Hiring Practices

By Trisa Kern, SHRM-CP, PI

When Columbia Legal Services (CLS) began examining our organizational practices through an anti-racist lens, it became clear that we needed to challenge our own belief systems about recruitment and hiring, and to shift our strategies to mirror our organizational values.

Human resources practices often revolve around unwritten rules and expectations, which make them particularly susceptible to implicit bias and the perpetuation of white supremacy culture or other beliefs and systems that give white people a structural advantage over other ethnic groups. Likely, you have heard phrases like…