Workforce diversity has been widely discussed as an essential part of the future success of our nation’s museums. Our field has asked the American Alliance of Museums to provide tools and solutions to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and these concepts are priority focus areas of our strategic plan. We’ve explored barriers to equity in our research at the Alliance’s Center for the Future of Museums and have experimented with bias-reduction strategies in our own hiring processes. We are continuing to use a challenge-based approach to recruiting and placing talent. Through this work, we identified the tech company GapJumpers as a partner. We’ve learned a lot and want to see if what we’ve learned can be applied to the museum field.

GapJumpers and the Alliance are partnering to launch our inaugural FutureLab: Hiring Bias project designed to help museums try out identity-blind hiring. We have negotiated a discounted fee structure of $500 per position. The fee covers the cost of developing, administering and scoring an online skills-based challenge for prospective applicants. We’ll be monitoring and sharing the cohort’s experiences with the field.

• This fee applies to only one specific position; any additional postings will cost the same amount. You are not limited to the number of positions you want to add, however.

• The actual process involves your museum working with the team from GapJumpers to develop a challenge that you want applicants to complete. You will identify the skills that you’d like to capture and work with them to create a rubric. GapJumpers then posts the job on their own website so that it is searchable by job seekers.

For further questions about the project, please contact Nicole Ivy.