What is performative diversity? Performative diversity is when an organization advocates and affirms a commitment to DEI but takes no practical actions towards achieving it.
 
Moving past affirmations and into action requires thoughtful, proactive, and concrete steps to foster a workplace that genuinely values a broadly diverse workforce. One of the most critical processes to examine and improve is your hiring practices, policies, and approach. The way your organization approaches hiring the Executive Director sets the tone for DEI in the rest of the organization. It also sends a message about how serious your Board is about equity.
 
As you begin to navigate your upcoming leadership transition, here is a list of some practices your organization can adopt that builds towards a more equitable, transparent, and human-centric hiring process.

Once upon a time, you would ask a person what they did for a living and they would likely tell you they were in sales. Or marketing. Or accounting. Or technology. Or one of several other common, easily-identifiable career categories.
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These days?  Well, thanks to the increased “consumerization” of the labor market and the resulting hyper-specialization of most job functions, it is hard to find people who fit these generalized career boxes any longer.  And if they do — or more importantly if YOU do — it might be time to rethink your career brand and update how you are marketing yourself, professionally.  As author Penelope Trunk remarked all the way back in 2007,  “being a generalist means being good at nothing and headed for long-term unemployment.  Generalist is the label for a career that will die.”

Hello. My name is Ed Rogan. I am a Partner at The Valtas Group and I work in our executive search practice.
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In this video, I’m going to offer five tips for preparing to interview. Before I jump into the tips, I want to set just a bit of context. At the Valtas Group, we specialize in working with Boards of Directors that are hiring CEOs and Executive Directors in the nonprofit sector. Even so, this advice does apply across situations and roles and I believe you’ll find something useful here regardless of the type of position you are seeking. Remember what they say, “luck is where preparation meets opportunity”.