Recruitment should be equitable, transparent, and low-barrier. Key considerations include:
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Advertising can utilize word-of-mouth, community centers, social media, partner organizations, and more. The reach of your advertisement should mirror the intentions you’ve set for this recruitment phase. We’ve had equal success flyering our downtown core as we have using referral networks and community partners. You can define the depth of reach needed by asking yourself:
- Do I have strict deadlines to attend to? Do I have capacity to screen applications from the general public?
- Am I looking to hire several team members, or very few? What will the outcome of this recruitment phase mean for my team dynamics?
- What kind of gaps in representation am I seeing? Would these gaps be best filled through targeted outreach, or by casting a broader net that may reach folks who may otherwise not have been engaged?
Defining Roles and Responsibilities
If the purpose of a lived experience team within your organization feels unclear, consider consulting with established lived experience teams. It is always better to take a slower and more considered approach to planning than to rush into poorly defined work plans. Purpose setting stages are a great time for collaboration and consultation with established teams. Valuing expertise means knowing when to ask the experts.
“Applicants must have a clear understanding of the role they are applying for.”
Often the need to include people with lived experience is identified before the role for people with lived experience has been clarified. We strongly recommend that a role description be established and made available to applicants well ahead of the earliest engagement. It’s okay (and often preferable in a co-design approach) if not all of the role details are established prior to the first round of recruitment, but applicants must have a clear understanding of the role they are applying for.
Roles, responsibilities, and expectations will inevitably become clearer over time. The first iteration of your team should come together with a codesigned approach, gradually defining the role description and establishing the team culture through an iterative process.
Sometimes “establish the job description” is the job description. It’s okay to be open with your team about the formative role they’ll be taking in the establishment of a new team, but the underlying purpose of the team must be clear.
Low-Barrier Application Processes
We often receive inquiries from people with lived experience who would like us to assess their resume. While resumes can be a great tool, they rarely provide the snapshot of an applicant’s skillset one would need to confidently hire for a lived experience team. The skills an applicant holds are significantly more important than where they learned those skills. People with lived experience are often hesitant to show the full range of their skills in a resume, as we anticipate our experiences will be discounted.
Instead, we recommend the use of an online application survey, with the option to apply via phone in cases where online surveys are not accessible to the applicant. The recruitment team should identify the factors one absolutely must know to make informed decisions about team makeup. While these questions may vary, they should include:
- Any special areas of interest or expertise
- Previous relevant professional or volunteer experience
- Eligibility criteria (i.e. residents of a particular service area, people able to attend in person meetings, etc.)
- Open ended questions. The application survey gives you your earliest opportunities to examine fit. While open-ended questions take longer to assess, they also give the applicant an opportunity to tell you who they are and why they’re well suited for the position.
Interviewing
After the initial application phase, selected applicants should be welcomed to an interview and given the opportunity to share more information about themselves. The community is very responsive to opportunities of this nature, with EST job postings regularly reaching 60 applicants in a cycle. Unfortunately, not all applicants can be brought in for an interview. In our experience, the overwhelming majority of applicants who do not make it to interviewing stages are not disqualified on the basis of any faux-pas, but rather simply aren’t interested in a position of this nature. As people with lived experience have been relegated to strictly peer support roles for quite some time, applicants may be unclear on the nature of system-change work and gear their application towards the expectation of direct support roles.
Interviewing gives a vital opportunity to talk out more complicated topics. Consider including subject matter like:
- What would the candidate do if a local sector leader said something offensive during a consultation?
- How would the candidate handle pressure to share personal stories/details? Are they comfortable “owning” their expertise without qualifying it with the use of personal storytelling?
- Have they worked in a team setting before? How did it go?
- Mission alignment questions (i.e. What causes homelessness? How do we fix the system?)