Recruitment and Hiring

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Recruitment refers to the process of identifying, attracting, interviewing, selecting and hiring new employees. In other words, the recruitment process involves everything from the identification of a staffing need to filling that need. This phase of the employee lifecycle at the DOE is crucially important as it shapes the new hire’s first impressions of the organization and of your team. 

Diversity Recruitment Toolkit Button which takes reader to the diversity recruitment toolkit

Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring at the DOE

The DOE strives to meet our students where they are and provide the support, resources, and high expectations for them to achieve consistently at high levels. While students experience the DOE mainly through their respective school buildings, all DOE employees interact with or make decisions on behalf of students daily. Therefore, our commitment to cultural responsiveness must extend beyond our classrooms to our offices and workplaces. This commitment starts with examining our recruitment and hiring processes.

To support our commitment to diverse and inclusive workplaces, the Division of Human Resources (DHR) and the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity Management (OEO) have created the Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Policy, the Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Toolkit, and the Structured Interviewing Guide. 

Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Policy 

At the DOE, we aim to create diverse and inclusive environments that value the experience, perspective, and contributions of all employees, applicants, students, and families. This organizational commitment to diversity and equity has led DHR and OEO to create a new inclusive recruitment and hiring policy with meaningful practices to ensure tangible change within the agency. 

In support of this new policy, DHR is launching an Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Training to help create workplace equity from the beginning of the employee lifecycle. All Human Resource Directors (HRDs), HR professionals, and hiring managers are required to participate. Together, the policy, training, and best practice resources on this page will help the DOE move further towards creating a more equitable work environment at the DOE. For questions about training opportunities related to inclusive recruitment and hiring, email InclusiveRecruitmentandHiring@schools.nyc.gov.

The Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Policy document is available here.

The Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Toolkit

The Inclusive Recruitment and Hiring Toolkit includes general principles and best practices for diversifying our workforce and creating workplace environments that reflect the identities of our students and communities. In this toolkit, you will find a collection of recommendations, tips, and resources to support hiring managers and HR directors to identify their needs, source a diverse pool of candidates, and mitigate bias throughout the recruitment and hiring processes. Here is a snapshot of the guidance and resources you will find in the toolkit: 

  • Mapping Your Recruitment Process: Review best practices and prompts to define your team’s recruitment needs and timeline.
  • Sourcing a Diverse Pool of Candidates: Discover key levers for ensuring a diverse pool of candidates.
  • Reviewing Applicants: Learn how to refine your outreach and screening processes to increase diversity within your team’s candidate pool and pipelines.
  • Interviewing Candidates: Explore best practices for assessing the quality of your candidate pool accurately, including sample tools for standardizing your interviewing process.
  • Selecting the Best Candidate: Adopt practices and tools to reduce bias within the decision-making process and choose the best candidate for your role.
  • Recruitment Tools and Resources: Review key definitions, tools and resources for outreach and recruitment

The Structured Interviewing Guide

Interviewing is a vital part of the recruitment process because it provides an opportunity for an employer to gauge how well a candidate’s skills align with the needs of the agency. Structured interviews help keep hiring managers focused on specific skills and abilities required for the vacant position rather than basing hiring decisions on emotions, commonalities with a candidate, or non-job related aspects of a candidate. 

The Structured Interviewing Guide is a compilation of recommendations, tips, and resources to support hiring managers and HR directors in creating a structured interview system. Here is a snapshot of the advice and resources found in the guide:

  • Determining the Key/Core Competencies for on the Job Success: Explore strategies and best practices for reviewing what is stated in the job description.
  • Developing a List of Behavioral and Situational Questions: Create questions that are reflective of the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful in the job.
  • Creating a Rubric/Scorecard: Develop standardized, objective evaluation criteria to ensure consistency and document decision-making process for each candidate.
  • Reviewing Resumes: Learn how to redact applicant information that may contribute to implicit bias while still containing the candidate’s core competency information.
  • Assembling an Interview Panel/Hiring Committee: Convene a group that is prepared to navigate unconscious/affinity bias that may arise during the interview and hiring process.
  • Conducting Interviews: Understand how and when to ask questions and take objective notes while conducting interviews.
  • Tools and Resources: Review key concepts, tools and resources for creating a structured interview system.

Download the Structured Interviewing Guide here.

Additional Resources for Recruiting and Hiring

Your program and/or operations teams may have created additional recruiting and hiring resources, such as a hiring process flow chart, selection process timeline, expectations document, list of pre-vetted candidates, or reference check guide. For more information about these, refer to the “Recruiting and Hiring Resources” section of the Onboarding Toolkit for Hiring Managers, Human Resource Directors, and Onboarding Support Teams. Also see the sources of information listed below: