Dear Trans Lifeline Community,
I am writing you this letter in hopes that it can serve as a first step (of many) towards holding our impact on our community with more care and accountability.
I know that our process for the recruitment of three new hotline operators caused a lot of impact, harm, and stress on so many of you. It feels important for me to start with what happened and why this approach?
So, what happened? A week ago, we began the recruitment process for three new hotline operators here at Trans Lifeline. We committed ourselves to a new practice of giving folks one week to prepare a self-tape and their resume to submit during a submission window where we would take the first 100 complete applications that came through. We stated that the submission window would be open for 48 hours or until the first 100 applications came in. To our surprise, we received over 2,500 applications before the submission window even opened. We did our best to reach out to every single applicant to let them know to submit again within the window we outlined in the job posting. When the submission window finally opened, we received over 1,200 applications within five minutes. The sheer volume of applications caused many people to receive an error message on the site (Lever), leaving them uncertain if their applications were submitted. This was undoubtedly a stressful, painful, and frustrating experience for so many of you. Shortly after, we posted on social media that within five minutes we had to close the application submission form, leaving many of you feeling unheard, undervalued, and like your energy and efforts are not appreciated or acknowledged.
It feels important to give you all the why behind this approach. When we decided to begin the recruitment process for these open roles, we wanted our practices to be more honest with our community about our internal capacity so as to not overpromise something we could not deliver on. We recognize that trans people disproportionately experience extraction during recruitment processes with long, drawn-out interviews, which often disrespect and undervalue their time. We implemented this approach in an attempt to better support our community. Trans Lifeline has had to work hard to regain your trust, and we continue to learn more and more about all the ways we need to do better, show up more and differently, and push ourselves to be more transparent and accountable. The truth is, we have been through a lot as an organization; our team here has had to withstand many storms of instability and harm, and we are rebuilding and learning and making mistakes as we go. We are a small but mighty team of all trans people from so many lived experiences and identities. We hoped that our rich intersecting experiences could have resulted in a process that would be more honest about what we actually had capacity for.
We know now that our impact has caused so many of you hurt and further distrust in us. The process we strived towards landed in ways that did not build accessibility. This process hurt you, and we are genuinely sorry. We are committed to learning to do better, and we hope that we can move towards repairing with you all in ways that honor our capacity and also honor your experiences.
I am truly grateful to our team here who share their perspectives and ideas with me so we can try things on in real time to shift our practices and listen more deeply to the feedback we receive.
We have decided to shift our next step in this recruitment process to build more equity while also remaining true to the honest capacity of our team. We want to share that we will do our best to review as many of the applications that came in today during the submission window through Lever. We ask for patience and understanding as our small, two-person People and Culture team may not be able to review all applications by our target interview dates. Our aim is to build more equitable opportunities for those who applied within the submission window but were not among the first 100. This decision will adjust our originally outlined recruitment timeline. We are committed to beginning the interview process by April 7th at the latest, and we will do our best to review as many complete applications as possible in preparation for that date. (Please note that our initial interview date was scheduled for the week of March 24th.)
We understand this does not resolve the frustration and disappointment experienced by those who couldn’t submit applications within the submission window. We regret the impact this had on you. We at Trans Lifeline are committed to developing more considerate and accessible recruitment strategies for upcoming roles, and we will be better prepared to handle the volume of applications next time.
I know this is just one step of many we have to take as an organization to build trust with you; please know that we are learning and want to continue to do better.
With love and gratitude,
kai (he/they)
Executive Director at Trans Lifeline