How CSW Employs Ethical Hiring Practices

CSW is committed to employing ethical hiring practices, ensuring we give every single applicant to our organization a fair chance at any job opening. We also firmly believe in the principles of racial equity and inclusion, which is why we are intentional about incorporating these values into our hiring process. Since 2019, we have updated and maintained our hiring strategy to ensure we implement hiring best practices. Here’s how we do it:

We are candid about our salary ranges

Every role at CSW has salary transparency; we offer a clear salary range at hire and maintain transparent pay bands for every role. This ensures two things:

1. We don’t waste your time by hiding a salary range which may not align with your needs.
2. We minimize potential gender and racial pay imbalance by being open up front about what each role earns.

By including transparent salary ranges in job postings, we offer our applicants a tool to have an open conversation about salary while keeping clear expectations for negotiations.

Salary transparency also promotes staff retention, as research shows, “When organizations educate employees about how pay is determined, employee trust in the organization increases by 10% and pay equity perceptions increase by 11%.” Each year, CSW leadership update and validate the pay bands for each role, presenting this data to staff for full transparency and fairness.

We removed education & degree requirements from job postings

Research from Opportunity@work shows there are 70+ million U.S. workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), like military service, training programs, partial degree completion, skills bootcamps, and learning on the job — rather than a bachelor’s degree. We understand and respect that relevant experience can come from degrees as well as many different forms of life experience. To that end, we practice skills-based hiring, focusing on a candidate’s competencies and removing any requirement for a certain kind or level of education. While we welcome our candidates to celebrate their achievements in education and training, we do not include education as a category in our screening process.

We use humans—not AI—to screen all applicants

Our job descriptions are unique and complex, just like our applicants’ experience and background. “Some experts say AI tools are inaccurately screening some of the most qualified job applicants – and concerns are growing the software may be excising the best candidates.” That is why we don’t rely on AI to screen the applications we receive. In order to give every applicant a chance to make their case, we have CSW staff review all applications.

Our hiring process begins with a screening review composed of a committee of CSW staff. These staff are tasked with ensuring the basic requirements for candidacy have been met:

1. Did the applicant submit all requested documents? (Typically resume & cover letter)
2. Does the applicant have the minimum job experience needed for the position to which they applied?

Applicants who meet both of these criteria are moved to the next stage in the review process.

We anonymize all identifying applicant information to reduce reviewer bias

Research has consistently shown that White-sounding names are more likely to receive callbacks for jobs than those with Black-sounding names. While we have confidence in CSW staff’s commitment to equitable hiring practices, we take additional steps to help ensure that bias does not impact any candidate’s opportunity in our hiring process.

The anonymization process works as follows:

1. Screening committee staff use a “search & find” tool to identify all instances of an applicant’s name on their submitted documents.
2. All instances of their name, or other personally identifiable information including LinkedIn profiles, email addresses, and photos, are redacted.
3. Redacted documents are saved with a unique candidate number for the hiring committee to reference.

This process leaves all resumes, cover letters, and other submitted documents cleanly redacted and identifiable only by the unique candidate number.

Our hiring committee is different from our screening committee

Obviously, any staff involved in the screening process have a clear idea of who the final applicants may be, even after anonymization. That is why our screening committee is separate from the hiring committee. The hiring committee only has the opportunity to review the fully anonymized applications.

In this stage of the process, the hiring committee identifies the top applicants based on their redacted documents. This allows for a focus on experience and ability, minimizing personal bias.

As leaders in the workforce development field, it is our honor and responsibility to provide quality job opportunities, and accompanying quality hiring practices, to our community. We will continue to educate ourselves and adjust our hiring process to reflect changes in best practices.