After harping on my teams about the need to engage employers proactively for something like 15 years, I am starting to realize that we need to reframe this activity.
Yes, I’m dense. It takes a long time to see the obvious.
I suspect that when people think about employer engagement they think about cold calling businesses. We know that public speaking is one of the primary fears of most humans, so it is not surprising that they do not want to beat feet into a local retailer to discuss a part-time job for a seventeen year old career seeker and they are nervous transition age youth and they are nervous about contacting a local hospital to discuss how experienced career seeker’s skills can produce the quality of care and positive margin the hospital needs to thrive.
I suspect that we should reframe employer engagement as networking. This may elicit a gag reflex from anyone who has ever attended a local Chamber of Commerce showcase or job fair cum cattle call. But I think that the practice of networking can be slightly less intimidating and far more effective than cold calling.
One of my first weeks as an employment specialist, my trainer told me to “get ready to ask everyone I have ever known to help a career seeker take their next step.” Over the past eighteen years, I have returned to this advice many times. I am constantly asking friends for job leads in their companies, calling people I may not have spoken to in several years to provide an informational interview via Zoom for my clients,[1] and asking other friends for connections to various City Halls.[2] While I don’t take the whole book literally, I am a true believer in the precept laid down in the New Testament book of James. “You do not have, because you do not ask.” I don’t want my clients to go without because I failed to ask. If you’re going to get good at this job, you gotta get good at asking.
One of my favorite books on leadership is Adam Grant’s Give and Take. Throughout the book Adam explores why the most successful people tend to be givers - as opposed to the much-loathed takers and the far more common matchers - and why the least successful people are usually also givers. To be a generous person without becoming a perpetual doormat takes some skill. One of the practices that Adam highlights is the Five-Minute Favor. The 5 Minute idea was coined by a Silicon Valley connector named Adam Rifkin, who decided to do anything a friend of colleague asked if it took five minutes or less. Share a contact, review a marketing precis, quick response to someone’s moonshot? If Rifkin could do it in less than Five Minutes, he did it. At first, this idea sounds overwhelming, but unless you are sitting in a decision making seat for the Gates Foundation or having to carefully guard some other precious resource, your colleagues and acquaintances are unlikely to make large asks on a constant basis. I have practiced the Five-Minute Favor for a number of years and it has provided confirmation of that old biblical truth, “give and it will be given to you…for the same measure you give will be measured to you again.” If you want to learn more about the Favor, you can watch this Good Morning America clip with Adam Grant. Content Warning, the clip mentions The Bachelor.
Related to this is my belief that when it comes to resources for the disability community, it usually a good strategy to give all of your schemes, curricula, and connections away. The majority of the research in our field is driven by federal and state grants. These grants are often secured and administered by the University Centers on Excellence in Disability Services that are located in every state. Almost every concept that I cling to - such as the important role parental expectations play upon work, the astonishing percentage of time that employment professionals lose to often ineffective meetings and office administration, and the Charting a Life Course career planning tools that we use to equip clients to clarify their career trajectory - were created or clarified by university research. The tools I use and the approach I have honed have been picked up from experienced colleagues who work from the Direct Care to the Chief Executive level. Thus, there is nothing overly generous about my desire to work with open hands. What is freely received is just as easily given. Sharing training plans and job leads with other professionals has helped me build a robust network and has never left me or my clients in a state of lack. I realize that I am speaking from a nonprofit perspective. But the knowledge that has been developed through open-source computing leads me to believe that an orientation to generosity can also be effective, albeit likely in a more limited sense, in other fields. Moreover, in the networked, AI enhanced era, access to knowledge is not nearly as expensive as it was in the days we had to save for Encyclopedia Britannica. In this world the creative application of knowledge seems as important as knowledge creation. Admittedly, that is just my hunch. But I’m going to play it and I think that it is often beneficial and a helluva lot more fun to implement ideas in a collaborative manner.
My approach to networking with employers was transformed in 2007, my first year as a career coach, when I stumbled across a used copy of a book called Beyond Traditional Job Development by Denise Bissonette. Denise advises that instead of constantly supporting clients with disabilities to work through hiring processes that are designed to disqualify candidates, coaches should carefully analyze employer’s hiring needs and identify how their clients are uniquely suited to meet those needs. She then provides step by step guidance on how career coaches can create employment proposals that identify the role their clients will fill at the employer, the way the client’s contributions will make a material difference to the employer’s bottom line, and any accommodations like on-site career coaching or scheduling adjustments that the client will need to be an invaluable employee.
I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t think that I ever wrote a formal employment proposal. However, Denise’s approach inspired me to get out of my office and start visiting employers, often side by side with my clients in their home communities, in search of win/win placements. Time is a liar, but I know with terrifying certainty that it took me six months to secure my first placement. I started at Triangle in January 2007 and my first client did not start working until July 4, 2007.[3] I read Denise’s book somewhere in that first year. Thanks to Denise, I stopped sitting beside my clients waiting for offers. We were walking through their communities identifying problems my clients could solve and contributions they could make. By the end of my first eighteen months in the field, I had placed 14 of my 17 transition-age[4] clients in jobs and I was off and running. I am profoundly grateful for Denise and I know that disability focused career coaches can benefit from her work.
I am not saying that networking makes career coaching easy. We live in a society that trains us to quickly assess what surface level contributions people can make to capitalism so that we can quickly assign people employers based and shunt those with less easily observable skills aside. Once we have built trust and spent enough time with clients and those who love them best,[5] networking helps us to walk with our clients towards opportunities that are aligned with their particular gifts and employers’ or the markets’ pressing needs. Practice the Five-Minute Favor, collaborate with fellow professionals in our field by sharing your curricula or introducing them to an employer, take some time to revel in Denise’s wisdom and I think you’ll find career coaching slightly less difficult. That’s my hope for you, your career seekers, and our economy.
[1] COVID was a boon time for these requests as friends employed in smart phone retail educated my clients from their storefronts in Indiana and another friend talked the ins and outs of retail from a Primark store in Maryland.
[2] Did you know that according to my very fast envelope math based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve that up to 4.5% of Americans work for local, state, and federal governments? Many of them are teachers, but you would be surprised how diverse public sector employment is. Now that you know this, don’t be surprised if coming at our public servants with chainsaws inspires a recession.
[3] Impose whatever meaning you want to upon that unique date. I know that I do.
[4] 18–26-year-old.
[5] Surely the topic of another post.