The following is the City of Selah’s Plan for Trying to Increase Diversity of Job Applicant Pool:
Background:
City officials recognize that a diverse workforce can be a substantial benefit to the City. Employees with diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills, ages, family statuses, personal identities and heredities/ethnicities/national origins (including, but not limited to, people from historically disadvantaged groups) could benefit the City’s municipal government in many ways. Internal operations and processes could benefit from, and be improved by, the different perspectives and input that diverse employees can offer. For instance, employees who are military veterans, who have worked in locales distant from Selah and/or for entities that are significantly different from a municipal government, and who see and experience the world in different ways can help ensure that operations and processes do not remain stale and instead continue to evolve and progress. Services to community members, and public relations in general, could be improved by the different perspectives and input that diverse employees can offer. For instance, bilingual/multilingual language skills, first-hand familiarity with varied religious and personal beliefs, and the inherent ability to relate on a personal level to diverse people can be a benefit for any employer/service provider – and seem particularly valuable for a municipal government, because a municipal government must serve all residents and should strive to represent everyone. The potential benefits from a diverse workforce simply cannot be fully summarized in any written mission statement or “Plan”, because the potential benefits sometimes are apparent and obvious, and other times are imperceptible yet still genuine.
Currently, the City’s workforce includes multiple employees who can be properly described as “diverse” in terms of physical ability/disability status, heredities/ethnicities, and other characteristics. Those employees applied for job openings and were hired through the City’s preexisting job advertisement, applicant screening/interviewing, and employee selection/hiring processes. Thus, the City’s preexisting job advertisement, applicant screening/interviewing and employee selection/hiring processes are commendable and already fulfill legal and constitutional requirements. However, as noted above, there is always room for improvement on any operational process. And for that reason, the City is now implementing a Plan for trying to increase the diversity of its job applicant pool for future direct-employment job openings.
The Plan:
Whenever a direct-employment job opening exists in the future, the City will send/post a copy of the job advertisement to two job websites that target diverse jobseekers: specifically, www.diversityjobboard.com and www.pdnrecruits.com. This will cost several hundred dollars per instance, and the City is committed to spending those monies in order to utilize and hopefully benefit from these two job websites. In addition, the City will also send a copy of the job advertisement to a specified email account affiliated with the Selah Alliance for Equality (S.A.F.E.), which is a grassroots organization that endeavors to, among other things, increase equality in Selah and elsewhere. Via these actions, the City hopes that its job advertisements will reach – either directly or via forwarding – a broader spectrum of potential job applicants. (Job advertisements may also be disseminated in other ways, such as via newspaper ads and/or by posting flyers on bulletin boards.) In addition, the City will include the following equal-employment-non-discrimination-and-encouragement-to-apply statement on its job advertisements:
THE CITY OF SELAH ADHERES TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY PRINCIPLES. APPLICANTS FOR DIRECT-EMPLOYMENT POSITIONS ARE EVALUATED BASED ON LEGAL METRICS AND ACTUAL QUALIFICATIONS, AND NO ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION WILL OCCUR BASED ON RACE, COLOR, HEREDITY, ETHNICITY, NATIONAL ORIGIN, SEX, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, GENDER, GENDER IDENTITY, RELIGION, CREED, AGE LESSER THAN 40, MARITAL STATUS, FAMILY STATUS, RELATIONSHIP STATUS, VETERAN STATUS, ACTUAL OR PERCEIVED DISABILITY, AND/OR NECESSITY OF REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION(S). APPLICANTS OF COLOR AND/OR HISTORICALLY UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITIES ARE ENCOURAGED TO APPLY. DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS, EXPERIENCES AND SKILLS ARE RECOGNIZED AS POTENTIALLY VALUABLE TO THE CITY’S OPERATIONS, AND THUS DIVERSE APPLICANTS OF ALL TYPES ARE ENCOURAGED TO APPLY.
No quotas or preferences will be observed. Rather, the best candidate from each respective applicant pool – as determined by the metrics applicable to the specific job and the applicant’s actual qualifications – will be selected and offered the corresponding job. The City will adjust its applicant screening/interviewing and employee selection/hiring processes whenever reasonably necessary to accommodate an applicant’s unique situation, so as to ensure as best as reasonably feasible that all applicants get a fair shot at potentially obtaining direct employment.
Potential Future Adjustment(s):
The Plan will be updated whenever necessary to comply with legal or constitutional requirements and also whenever good cause exists for modifying the Plan. People are encouraged to submit ideas and suggestions for changing and improving the Plan to the City’s Human Resources Department, to the City Attorney and/or to the City’s elected officials.
Clarification(s):
This Plan will apply – as stated above – to future direct-employment job openings. By contrast, it will not apply to other types of positions, such as outside independent contractor positions, volunteer positions, unpaid internships, and elected positions – because those positions are not direct-employment positions. Nevertheless, diverse applicants are equally encouraged to apply for those types of positions and the City will likewise not illegally discriminate against any applicant for any of those positions. Also some direct-employment positions – such as sport referees and seasonal maintenance workers, among other positions – are inherently brief in duration, are part-time and have minimal pay and do not include benefits, and experience huge turnover with available and often unfilled openings existing perpetually or recurrently. Thus, future job openings for those types of direct-employment positions will likely be sent/posted to the above-referenced websites and email account only periodically – rather than each specific time an opening exists, and the corresponding advertisement likely will provide notice of multiple openings – rather than a separate advertisement being issued for each specific opening.