If you’re Black, at some point in your life, someone who wanted you to succeed may have told you that you need to be “twice as good to get half as much.”
You may have not been told that explicitly, but perhaps this sentiment was reinforced implicitly through emphasis put on academic excellence, or even through the overwhelming internal pressure to be the best at whatever it is you’re doing.
The notion of needing to be twice as good plays out consistently in the job hunting process. Those of us with names that give us away (ie. names that may be difficult for white people to pronounce) are very aware of the fact that our resumes must be twice as good as Sarah’s in order to get the interview.
In my experience, however, once I got the interview, I was pretty confident in my ability to dazzle prospective employers with my shiny personality that I cultivated through years of feeding my crippling addiction to white approval.
But I always had a really hard time securing that interview, which eventually led to me changing my name on resumes, and running a fascinating little a/b test, but more on that another day.
The point is, for most immigrants, the interview is by no means the end, but another stop on the rejection tour. Why? Because systemic racism has many tools, and accent discrimination is just one of them.
Eve and Capability Career Group
Eve, Founder of Capability Career Group.
Eve is the founder of Capability Career Group, a Calgary-based organization specializing in diversity, inclusion and belonging, academic advising, career development and employment skills workshops.
Eve started in this industry by working for employment agencies in Calgary and seeing first-hand just how rigged the system is.
“I worked with many employment agencies in the city, and I had seen a gap,” says Eve. “I’d sit in meetings and our coordinator who would meet with employers would [say] ‘employers don’t like people with difficult names, employers don’t like people with an accent.’ ”
As an immigrant herself, Eve naturally felt the depth of these comments.
“It came to the point where I walked out of that very lucrative role with benefits and stuff, and said ‘you know what? I don’t want to be part of this.’ ”
From there, Eve went back to school and studied career and academic advising at the University of Calgary.
“The goal was literally to just start my own thing and serve humans as humans.”
Capability Career Group started with a clear focus – career services, and had no intention of delivering diversity training.
“Initially it started with an aim of helping job seekers find jobs through resume services, cover letter writing services, interview preparation, LinkedIn profiles, and networking stuff.”
However, Eve quickly realized that this approach would only be so effective without getting to the root of the problem.
“I thought about the fact that I had worked in most of these offices in Calgary,” she said. “It wouldn't matter how much I teach my clients how to do better resumes, how to be excellent at networking, how to be excellent at interviewing, when in fact they were still going to go out there and meet with people who were not open to receive them.”
While Capability Career Group still focuses on helping immigrants find jobs, they’ve shifted their focus, acknowledging that it’s not on immigrants to be twice as good, but perhaps it's on the organizations to be half as racist.
“I’m not gonna go round and round teaching people how to find jobs when nobody’s gonna give them a job.”
Capability Career Group has designed a Workplace Transformation Tool for organizations in order to teach diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace. Eve, describes this process as “cleaning up the schools.”
“If you wanna send your kids to school, you’re gonna do research about the schools, right? So here I had researched the school and I knew that it was dirty. There was a lot of cleaning that needed to be done. So before I send my awesome, talented kids out there, I needed to clean up. So I’m doing the cleaning up at the moment.”
In addition to going into workplaces, Capability Career Group is developing a school outreach program in order to address discrimination taking place in schools.
While the need to be twice as good isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, Capability Career Group and similar organizations are making it so that one day, the process of searching for a job will be a little less awful.
To learn more about Capability Career Group, visit CapabilityCareerGroup.com