To mark the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, on July 26, 2010, President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order to increase the number of individuals with disabilities working in the federal government by 100,000 within the next five years. The Order requires federal agencies to develop new recruitment, hiring and retention strategies to increase their employment of persons with disabilities.
As federal agencies gear up to meet these new goals, DORS Business Employment Specialists Jody Boone, Christine Franklin and Darlene Peregoy will be there to help. Even before the new Executive Order provided increased impetus for federal hiring, these three have worked tirelessly with federal agencies to more than double their hiring of DORS consumers over the past two years.
Building Relationships
Jody Boone, Business Employment Specialist in the Office of Field Services, believes their success starts with building the right relationships at the agencies. “Developing the relationships, with the right people – with selective placement coordinators, disability program managers and hiring managers – that's definitely key.”
And key to those relationships, said Business Employment Specialist Darlene Peregoy of the Office for Blindness & Vision Services, “is being a single point of contact for the people in the agencies, so they don’t get all the different field counselors and all the consumers sending them resumes.” That way, the federal agency can trust that the candidates submitted by the Business Employment Specialists will be quality candidates, because they’ve established a reputation for integrity with the agency.
Pre-Screening Candidates
Christine Franklin, Business Employment Specialist for DORS Workforce & Technology Center, explained the process. Before a DORS consumer is recommended to a federal agency, he or she is pre-screened by the Specialists. The candidate must meet all the qualifications of the job to be sent on. Secondly, the resume itself must meet the exacting specifications of a federal resume. The Specialists will provide a template and work with the candidate to produce a suitable resume. “Pre-screening candidates, using the right format for the resumes, then submitting the resumes directly to the hiring managers and follow-up. We stay with the candidate through the hiring process.”
“I was working with a federal agency that had listed two jobs,” Jody Boone remembered. “They had gotten 80 resumes from a number of different agencies. The only resumes they accepted were ours, because we were the only agency that had pre-screened, made sure the resumes followed the right format, made sure the people were qualified. These were fairly high-level jobs and some of the other agencies had sent people who only had GEDs or were just starting college. The hiring manager took the time to call me and say how impressed she was with our candidates.”
Educating the Agencies & the Counselors
Another important service that the Business Employment Specialists provide is educating the hiring managers, disability coordinators and other HR staff in each agency about the business services that DORS can provide. Darlene said, “in terms of pre-screening applicants and letting them know about the internship programs that we can develop with them, I think it's educating them about what DORS can do to help them fill their human resource needs.” Jody added, “Once they see us as kind of an adjunct to their HR department, then they become really interested.”
“The other piece of that is actually participating in their staff development trainings,” Jody continued. At a number of agencies, the DORS Specialists have led training events with federal HR staff or hiring managers on how to work with people with disabilities and on disability employment issues.
“On the flip side,” said Christine, “we’ve also been educating our DORS staff and consumers about what the Feds are looking for and what the hiring process is. We want to make sure what they're submitting is correct and that they're competitive in the process.”
Their efforts are certainly paying off. Not only has the number of DORS consumers successfully achieving employment with the federal government doubled in the past two years, the average starting salary is nearly double that of the starting salary of the average DORS consumer. They have been asked to share the secrets of their success by speaking at the 2010 National Employment and Disability Conference and at Raising the Bar 2010, a conference for workforce development professionals.
At a recent meeting of the Maryland State Rehabilitation Council, Office of Field Services Director Ron Winter reported to the Council on the success of DORS federal employment program and gave praise to the Business Employment Specialists: “We've got three tremendous people in place, Christine Franklin at WTC, Darlene Peregoy at OBVS and Jody Boone at OFS, and those are three ladies with a tremendous amount of energy and abilities who are really making sure that when we do refer people to the federal government that they really are ready and they really showcase their skills well so that they can get employed.”
Now with the President’s Executive Order spurring even more hiring of individuals with disabilities in the federal government in the future, DORS three Business Employment Specialists will be working even harder to forge those agency relationships and find the qualified candidates to fill those positions.
Division of Rehabilitation Services (DORS)
2301 Argonne Drive
410-554-9385; Toll-free: 888-554-0334