Part 1: Diversity, Equity, and Belonging Initiatives at Curology

We at Curology believe that everyone deserves to feel safe, invincible, and equipped to thrive. This environment of psychological safety should begin at home, within the walls of our offices, and should extend to our entire community of Curology members. Our commitment to joining the #BlackLivesMatter movement begins by looking inward at our hiring practices, workplace policies, approach to marketing, and culture.

In early June, we acknowledged the progress we need to make as a company in order to achieve equity in our workplace for all Black employees. We began having long-overdue conversations about how to initiate systemic change at our organization and in our community to create an equitable and just environment in which our employees can thrive. “We need every Curology employee (and every future Curology employee) to know that they are welcome and celebrated for who they are and what they bring, that work is a safe and welcoming place, and that their voice matters,” says Vice President of People & Culture, Lindsay Putzer. “Different backgrounds, perspectives, voices, and strengths make us a stronger, more innovative team, and ultimately a more successful company.”

Diversity and representation are critical to Curology’s mission, and the principles on which the company was founded. “It is our responsibility to treat patients with the utmost care, respect, and compassion. We can only do this by building a company of people who truly understand our patients and their needs, and who bring talent, collaboration, and new ideas to the table across our entire company,” says CEO and Founder David Lortscher. “We need to hire, develop, and grow a richly diverse team in order to do this and to achieve our mission of making effective skincare accessible.”

We are optimistic that together, we will continue to make tangible progress toward our commitments to racial equity, and we won’t stop until we achieve them. This is our first in a series of blog updates that will offer insight into what’s going on behind the scenes in every department of Curology.

Hiring Initiatives:

• We have hired Curology’s first Head of Diversity, Equity & Belonging. This is a high-impact, full-time role with a dedicated budget, whose objectives include designing and implementing programs and strategies for ensuring Curology’s people practices and programs promote equitability in hiring, professional development, and management.

• A Curology employee has been hired as Diversity, Equity & Belonging Talent Partner. This individual is currently training the Recruiting team in amending our sourcing strategy for identifying candidates, with a focus on reaching out to networks of Black candidates and partnering with select job posting sites to increase visibility among diverse talent pools. Additionally, they are conducting dedicated sourcing across a range of roles and leading community- and education-related efforts internal to Curology.

• In order to minimize bias in the hiring process and increase the value we place on diverse experiences, viewpoints, and backgrounds, we have eliminated “culture fit” interviews, with an emphasis instead on values alignment and “culture add.” We have released a Hiring Playbook that standardizes our kick-offs for open roles and outlines a scorecard for evaluating candidates.

• We are now able to hire candidates based in all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., which enables us to be more equitable in our hiring; in the SF Bay Area, for example, ~5.2% of residents identify as Black, while the number of individuals who identify as Black is almost triple this number in the greater United States. Many of our roles have the potential to be full-time remote opportunities. For many corporate roles, we will provide a relocation bonus if the right candidate lives outside of the SF or SD area and needs to relocate.

• Hiring Goal: We cannot achieve a positive, just, and successful workplace environment without representation of the racial diversity across our country. We will continue to evaluate and change our hiring practices with the aim of more than representing the proportion of Black individuals in the locations of our offices (San Francisco and San Diego) as well as the greater United States.

Donations & Philanthropy:

• We have donated more than $25,000 to four organizations we are honored to support: the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Minnesota Freedom Fund, and Campaign Zero.

• By June 2021, we will donate an additional $75,000 to key organizations and individuals that support racial equity.

• We launched an employee donation matching program, with the capability of matching $500 per employee (up to $300,000 company-wide this year). This program will renew every calendar year and will be shared with every new hire as a key benefit of employment with Curology.

Anti-Racism Education & Involvement:

• We have hired TMI Consulting, a Black-owned consultancy with expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion, and its founder, Dr. Tiffany Jana, to conduct trainings for the Executive, Marketing, People and Culture, and Product Design teams on unconscious bias, DEI, and LGBTQIA+.

• We brought in our first keynote speaker on July 1 (Tony Bond, Chief Diversity and Innovation Officer at Great Place to Work) to address the entire company and share insights on Diversity, Belonging, Trust and Innovation.

• We have launched our Anti-Racist Book Club. Our first book is Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy. Our second book will be Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

• On Juneteenth, we launched our “On this Day” initiative, for which the team creates robust educational materials to ensure all Curology employees gain awareness of historically and culturally significant days for Black people in America. We asked everyone to buy a book (on us) from an Anti-Racist Book List, with proceeds benefitting a Black-owned bookstore. We will continue the “On this Day” series to spotlight historical events that have significantly affected marginalized groups.

Maintaining a Safe Workplace Culture:

• We’ve redistributed our anonymous feedback form for voicing discomfort, experiences of microaggressions, or other employee concerns. The aim is to ensure every voice at Curology has a safe and confidential mode for surfacing their experiences with racism at the company.

• We launched our Diversity, Equity, and Belonging taskforce, which now meets monthly and includes employees from across the company. The taskforce identifies opportunities that Curology can lean into for prioritizing diversity and belonging. With the task force’s leadership and guidance, Curology will engage the rest of the company in these key initiatives.

• We conducted an organization-wide Diversity, Equity and Belonging survey, and have shared the results of the analysis with the Executive team, DE&B task force, and People & Culture leadership team, with the aim of more deeply understanding the nuances of employee experience.

Our work on eradicating bias from our policies and culture will continue. We are grateful and energized to be committing to systemic change for the long-haul, and are excited to build the workplace we are all proud to work and grow in. We will publish our next update on the topic of our Marketing and Brand initiatives in December 2020. Stay tuned on social media and here on our blog.

Written by

Curology Team