2016 Postmortem

DemocratSinceBirth

(99,710 posts) Wed Jan 6, 2016, 01:33 PM Jan 2016

How the Hillary Clinton campaign built a staff as diverse as America-It didn't happen by accident

What an inspiring song!

Two years ago, Nathaniel Koloc, cofounder and then-CEO of ReWork, a recruiting firm that matches people looking for meaningful jobs with companies doing good in the world, was showing his friend how to use Twitter as a networking tool.

His friend loved politics, and it was right after President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, so Koloc tweeted the campaign’s COO, Ann Marie Habershaw, and asked how they hired their staff. "Political campaigns have to hire so many people so quickly, and there is so much at stake," Koloc said, so surely she would have tips that could help his friend. It took two minutes for her to tweet back, and one day to hop on the phone with the then 27-year-old, who had no experience in politics.

What she told Koloc, who today is the director of talent acquisition and development for Hillary for America, shocked him: Political campaigns typically don’t have anyone dedicated to hiring. Department heads individually bring people on as needed, and usually those people come from their inner circles. "The thing about politics is that it is really a word-of-mouth game," says James Hohmann, national political correspondent for the Washington Post, who has rubbed shoulders with countless staffers in the three presidential elections he's covered. "A lot of times people get put in important positions because they happened to show up or they know a friend . . . there is a really ad hoc nature to how it works." The problem with inner circles, of course, is that they tend to look like the (white male) people at their centers, potentially perpetuating the lack of diversity—an acknowledged problem in the tech space and elsewhere.

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