Equal opportunity.

The commitment

RETAIN HEALTH is an equal opportunity firm. We source, assess, and represent candidates without regard to any protected characteristic, and we do not accept a search assignment that asks us to do otherwise — however the request is phrased.

This applies to everything we do: who we approach, who we assess, who we advance, what we tell a client, and how we advise on an offer.

How it's built in, not just stated

A commitment that lives only in a paragraph is difficult to keep and impossible to check. Ours is built into the mechanics of how we assess people:

• No protected characteristic is ever recorded. Our assessment system contains no field for any of them. There is nowhere to put the information, so it cannot inform a score.
• Every candidate in a search is assessed against identical written criteria. The scale, the anchors, and the weights are fixed and documented in our Retention Index™ methodology, published in summary here, with the complete version available on request.
• Culture fit means shared values, not similarity. We assess whether a candidate aligns with an organization's mission and how it makes decisions — never whether they resemble the existing team in background, communication style, or personality. Culture-fit scores are audited for whether higher-rated candidates cluster on demographic lines, and re-examined where they do.
• Career gaps are not penalized. We assess how well a career move is explained, never the fact that time passed. People step away from work for reasons that are nobody's business but their own.
• Logistical questions come from the candidate, never from assumption. We record what a candidate tells us is sustainable for a specific role. We do not infer it from where someone lives or what we imagine their circumstances to be.
• A person makes every decision, and signs it. No software screens anyone out, and no score determines an outcome. The Retention Index™ is advisory: every advance-or-decline is made by a named person, with a written, job-related reason attached.
• Every assessment is retained for at least four years. If anyone ever asks why a decision was made, there is a documented answer rather than a recollection.

What we ask of clients

We work on behalf of employers, and the standard runs in both directions. We will not screen for a protected characteristic at a client's request, whether stated directly or implied through a proxy — "someone who'll fit in with a young team," "no career gaps," "someone local to avoid relocation complications."

If a search requirement looks like a proxy for a protected characteristic, we'll raise it, explain why, and propose a job-related alternative that gets at the real underlying need. In our experience there almost always is one, and it usually produces better candidates.

If you think we've got it wrong

Tell us. Directly, and without going through anyone else. We would far rather hear that we handled something badly than find out later that someone walked away thinking so.

We'll acknowledge within two business days, look at the actual record of the assessment rather than our memory of it, and give you a written answer. If we were wrong, we'll say so plainly and tell you what we've changed.

You also have the right to contact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or your state's civil rights agency at any time, whether or not you've raised anything with us first.