Quality Improvement in Public Health Hiring for Diversity: A Process and an Intervention Plan

In 2010, Human Resources of Public Health –Seattle & King County launched the Equity and Social Justice Quality Improvement Hiring Project. The project's objective was to increase the diversity of our staff by adopting best practices in hiring, so that staff reflect the racial and ethnic composition of communities we serve. This presentation will describe the project's three steps, after a brief review of quality improvement (QI) methods. First we will show how we analyzed data on race, ethnicity and job category of 27,460 applicants and 539 persons hired in 2008-2010 that discovered race/ethnic patterns in hiring outcomes and at stages in the hiring process. Second, we will describe the activities of a QI team convened to conduct a root cause analysis of these trends in our hiring. Third, we will describe the robust list of interventions the QI team proposed to reduce the impact of bias and institutionalized racism on the hiring process, and the methods we will use to track outcomes of the interventions over the next five years. We will close with observations on how this process might differ in or be applied to other settings.