AOS Anti-Racism Statement Follow-Up

AOS Anti-Racism Statement Follow-Up

Pursuing an Anti-Racist Culture at Applied Ocean Sciences

 In the course of our initial URGE cohort, a team from Applied Ocean Sciences formulated an anti-racist statement and created objectives that the company committed to pursue in order to build an anti-racist culture.

 The most important objective that we identified was revamping our hiring process in order to safeguard against the racist effects of implicit bias. To that end, we overhauled our search process, our criteria setting process, our interview process, and our selection process. An entirely new hiring process is now in place.

      -Our process now includes a strategic job analysis. We will prioritize are prioritizing our needs in advance of a search with the goal of decreasing the danger of our own networks and relationships driving hiring.

       -Our candidate search process now includes internal references as well as external postings including job a variety of job boards with the goal of increasing interest from BIPOC job candidates. For example, we have a Handshake profile connected to HBCU’s to ensure that we are recruiting BIPOC candidates.          

Furthermore, we committed to interrogating our biases as a team at our annual Offsite, which we have done.  

Finally, we committed to prioritizing attendance by all our employees at all levels at conference sessions led by or aimed at BIPOC persons.  

We are very much in process, and we are looking forward to URGE Refinement.

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