Earlier this month Happy Cog posted a message of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and also made a public commitment to do better as a company regarding diversity and inclusion. Happy Cog does not tolerate racial discrimination in any form. We stand firmly as anti-racist, and are committed to combating racism and the lack of opportunities available to people of color in our industry.
We are committed to do better at reaching out to underrepresented groups and diversifying our applicant pool, as well as supporting and celebrating the diversity within our own team. We are still learning from people within and outside of the company on how to keep moving forward, but today, Juneteenth 2020, we want to publicly share some initial steps we have taken in recent weeks as a further affirmation that we are committed to making concrete changes in the way we operate.
- Expanded the list of platforms we use to advertise job openings to those that are dedicated to BIPOC job seekers.
- Began a process to completely overhaul and standardize our sourcing, recruitment, interviewing, and hiring practices, including changes to job advertisements, interview feedback mechanisms, and the resume review process to include more documentation to keep us accountable.
- Initiated a complete revamp of our biannual employee review process to reduce ambiguity and focus on reducing biases in 360° feedback.
- Auditing on where we stand in terms of diversity compared to other companies and the general population.
None of these incremental changes on their own are a solution to any single problem, nor are they sufficient together to address the lack of opportunities and racism in our world and profession. By sharing this information publicly we hope to keep ourselves held accountable to our commitments. We are continuing to learn and there is much, much more we intend to do, both now and longer term. This post is just an update, and by no means a declaration that our work is anyway near complete (we’ll never be “done”). We will continue to share our progress and work with others in the community and within Happy Cog to continue to improve.