The Job Board: Part 1
A trip down memory lane
Remember earlier this year when the tech industry collectively decided that Black lives do in fact matter? The tech companies released their pro-Black statements, offered free stuff for Black people, renamed git branches and bought one of the many books about racism. Since then racism has continued to do what it does, who would have thought that changing “master” to “main” was going to do absolutely nothing to improve the experiences of Black people?
During that time, I too was inspired. For the last few years I’ve been looking for ways to make money as ethically as possible while leveraging the skills I gained from working on blackgirl.tech. I’m very proud of the work we were able to do with the org and while I’m not sure I’m ready to throw myself back into non-profit stuff full-time, I did want to find a way to connect Black people to companies that weren’t the absolute worst places to work.
Something actionable
I’ve toyed with starting some kind of service where I connect and recommend people for jobs at companies I’ve personally vetted or a job board where anyone can post a job but they have to adhere to the board’s terms & conditions. But these ideas either end-up being unethical (to me) or unscalable.
So, when all the companies were talking about making the tech industry safer for Black people with free subscriptions to their services (“reparations” I guess?). I thought it might be a good idea to give some more thought into how to empower Black tech workers a little bit when applying for jobs, while also holding tech companies to their word. You say you want to hire more Black people, that’s great but it’s also important that your company is as safe as possible for Black people, which also means it needs to be as safe as possible for disabled people, LGBTQIA+ people, and people of marginalised genders because Black people exist in all these spaces.
Alright, so what’s the idea?
A job board where Black people can search for open roles from companies that have been vetted, essentially they’ll need to meet certain minimum requirements before they can post a job. In my part 2 I’ll speak more about the way I’m thinking of going about this and the technology I’m considering, I want to build this in public as a kind of way to track progress. So here’s to trying to build a good and useful thing.