Our commitment to change

June 21, 2020
commitment to change

Black lives matter. George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and countless others matter.

At Altus, our goal is ambitious but simple: to create a world served by exceptional professionals – which includes all colours and backgrounds. 

We condemn racism in all its forms. 

It goes against our company values and that of our team, partners, and applicants. We are committed to amplifying the collective message: Black lives matter.

To emphasize actions over words, and make tangible and measurable lasting change, we felt it was important to our team, our partners, and our applicants to share our next steps.

The company

As a company, we are proud of the diversity across our team. But to be blunt, the lack of visible diversity at our leadership level is a failure. No excuses. We aspire to be a company representative of the rich diversity that exists in our communities. We are committed to prioritizing diversity and inclusion to our entire approach of hiring and training by working with experts in this field for both near- and long-term change in the company, while also listening to our colleagues belonging to minority groups.

The product

We proudly deliver Casper, a situational judgment test (SJT) that assesses an applicant’s non-academic abilities, such as communication, empathy, ethics, problem-solving, and collaboration. Although we strive to deliver a test that is fair and equitable, we acknowledge that we fall well short of this goal. The majority of assessments show differences between different demographic groups, sometimes also referred to as sub-group differences. Compared to other tests in our industry, Casper shows smaller demographic differences because it was purposefully designed to use an open-format answer style, independent diverse human raters, and other tools to minimize test bias. This is positive, but far from perfect.

We know we can do better. We are committed to understanding and addressing bias and systemic racism in our assessment; working with partner programs, applicants, and external experts to do the work and research necessary to make our assessment more equitable; and learn from and change how demographic differences are discussed and reported at Altus, in the assessment industry, and the admissions community. It may sound like a tall order but it is one that we know we need to address.

The communication

We have an important role in selecting the future generation of professionals and we take this responsibility seriously: you will see a change in our webinars and social feeds, putting more focus on diversity and inclusion. We will amplify news, views, and stories from people that represent marginalized groups within our own team and the community we serve. Not elevating these diverse voices equates to being silent.

As a way of showing our support, we have made donations to a number of local and national organizations on behalf of the team at Altus, and as individuals: George Floyd Memorial Fund, National Bail Fund Network, Black Visions Collective, Black Women in Motion, Black Health Alliance, Black Lives Matter Toronto, Loveland.

We also made additional donations on behalf of the admissions community to Black Health Matters and Toronto-based Black Women in Motion.

Lastly, we are committed to providing updates to our community as we move forward with these actions. We want to be judged not only for what we do today for racial equality but how we learn and contribute in the long-term. We welcome the feedback to help keep us to our promises.

– The team at Altus Assessments


Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash