Employment Archives - Page 5 of 8 - The Voice of Job Seekers

Second Chance for Job Seekers with GoodHire

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I started noticing then following GoodHire a while ago because they were publishing about the need to give ex-offenders a second chance. I loved their voice on employment discrimination and the ex-offenders reentering the workforce. If you have been listening to this podcast for awhile, you know I champion the “Ban The Box” campaign—very related to how GoodHire is helping ex-offenders having a second chance. More than 30,000 employers rely on their skilled compliance experts, helpful US-based customer service reps, and customizable technology to build teams based on trust, safety, and fairness.

Matthew Monahan is the CEO of GoodHire. l would love to hear your thoughts about this episode in one of three ways:

Call and leave a voicemail at 708-365-9822, or text your comments to the same number
Go to TheVoiceofJobSeekers.com, press the “Send Voicemail” button on the right side of your screen and leave a message
Send email feedback to [email protected]

Matthew Monahan founded GoodHire with his brother Brian. For the last ten years, GoodHire has been helping job seekers with knowing what employers see on their background checks. The ex-offender especially benefits because they can add a personal narrative to their results. Unlike most company’s background checks, this humanizes the process.

Here are a few of our talking points:

Matthew explained that GoodHire’s mission is to build trust between job seekers and employers
Good Hires focuses much of their attention on the job seeker
Services are free to job seekers, give them a sense of empowerment by making background screens to job seekers
Unique features are available to job seekers to annotate their background check
Job seekers can see what employers can see and provide an explanation for the employer
GoodHire’s “True Me” feature adds humanity to the background. Opposite of most companies conducts where the process is automated

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About Mark Anthony Dyson

I am the "The Voice of Job Seekers!" I offer compassionate career and job search advice as I hack and re-imagine the job search process. You need to be "the prescription to an employer's job description." You must be solution-oriented and work in positions in companies where you are the remedy. Your job search must be a lifestyle, and your career must be in front of you constantly. You can no longer shed your aspirations at the change seasons. There are strengths you have that need constant use and development. Be sure you sign up to download my E-Book, "421 Modern Job Search Tips 2021!" You can find my career advice and work in media outlets such as Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Glassdoor, and many other outlets.

by Mark Anthony Dyson

Teaching Young People Value and What it Means to Their Career (And Yours)

This article was originally published on the Good Men Project!

Learned values early on will benefit teens in the workplace and in life.

I didn’t value money the same way my dad did when it came to money. It changes from generation to generation for most of us in my view. For those of us who are Baby Boomers, we understood, and at times, we were forced to understand what our parents valued. It was critical because if you didn’t, you would miss out. It was Dad’s philosophy that counted the most.

My dad didn’t waste money in any way. He always talked about saving money.

He was so great at saving; he retired at 59. For many Baby Boomers like me, we will be working past 65, or won’t retire at all.

My dad saved coins. Lots of coins. He had a tray with a divider on his dresser categorized by types of coins: silver dollars, half dollars, quarters, nickels, and dimes. He didn’t waste money in any way. He always talked about saving money.

Me, the coin thing, not so much. I am thrifty, but not through coins. I just don’t spend a lot of money. My sons are the same way, and my wife as well, although she loves coin saving. She has tried to convince my sons to save coins but to no avail.

When both my sons were teens, my parents thought they were old enough to appreciate coin saving. When the new quarters were released, mom and dad started a coin collection for them. My parents called relatives and friends to help collect quarters from each state. It took them a few months to complete the collection but they did it! On a visit to New York, they wanted me to take the collection back to the boys. You should have seen the accomplishment glow in my parents’ eyes! They were extremely excited to share this collection with the boys.

The parallels are important for job seekers of all age but critical for our teen children to learn now.

Let me back up a bit. My wife loves coin-saving, so she can spend it. She would (and still does) save coins to go shopping as part of her MAD MONEY. To her credit, it was to save up for the boys to get what they needed and sometimes wanted. At times, it was for herself. That change was spent.

So back to my visit with my parents, who proudly presented me with the quarter collection they spent so much time and effort on. They asked me to take it back to them. With all of the parental data I collected, at that moment, I just asked them to hold on to it. That was four years ago, and they still have it. The reason wasn’t only the boys will want to spend it. In monetary value, it was $11.25. In its true value, it was hours, time, thought, love, encouragement, and hope in collecting it.

I didn’t want to give that away to be under-appreciated. At least at that time.

The parallels are important for job seekers of all age but critical for our teen children to learn now:

1.- Employers will not give away what they value to someone who doesn’t try to understand. A career is more than duties and responsibilities. Whatever you contribute to an employer is increasing the value of the position and the company. They need to know you will and how you will.

2.- Do you understand your value? Is it only summarized by its cash value? That’s the difference between finding a job or gaining a career. How much work have you invested through time, education (not necessarily college or trade school), enduring hardships, and learning through failure?

3.- Employers mostly hire those who establish value wins for both sides. If there isn’t a sense of satisfaction for both the employer and candidate, then eventually everyone loses. If I gave the coins to my boys at that time, although appreciated initially, them squandering the collection would have broken my parents.

Similarly, by hiring the wrong person, employers would feel their investment is similarly squandered. Hiring today takes nearly 60 days although it is bound to get shorter in days to come. In the meantime, companies are scrutinizing each candidate more and more.

4.- Does your reputation (or personal brand) determine how you will be entrusted with a sacred opportunity? What are others saying about your behavior, work, and response to a crisis?

5.- Do you know why it’s a sacred opportunity – to the employer? Your research needs to tell you why. Your actions must display that you’re convinced you should bring dignity to that position. How? Focus on skills and measured results as proof!

No one has equal value as no one values equally. What we value as parents will change, upgrade and downgrade and for our children, it will be the same at a faster pace. In years to come, they will have two or three remote jobs, and learning what employers need will be critical as the expectation for good work, perpetual learning, and business savvy are basic means for survival.

About Mark Anthony Dyson

by Mark Anthony Dyson

The Values of Workplace Diversity and Inclusion

Editor’s note: Ivy Liu (@MandatoryPoster) is the guest writer today. Her website is easybusinessposters.com

One of the most heartening employment trends in recent years has been many employers’ movement growing towards giving lip service toward the complementary goals of diversity and inclusion in the workplace — whether led there by values of social justice or by the practical need to find qualified workers. After all, an increasingly competitive global market no longer leaves US employers with the luxury of excluding significant parts of the talent pool from their search.

As employers become more attuned to the need to select their workforces based on talent, even if it means looking in areas that may previously been overlooked. It is more important for employers to communicate the value of diversity and inclusion throughout their organizations. That means clearly conveying the message – not just in boilerplate statements in the annual report, but also as part of the day-to-day communications with managers, supervisors and human relations staff on how implementing these values brings practical benefits to the entire organization.

I want to suggest one way to show this. In any workplace, you will find bulletin boards displaying an array of government-required notices and posters. It may be some while since you’ve looked at them, but if you examine them carefully, you’d find they did more than merely serve notice of various state and federal labor law posters that employers must comply. In fact, in many of them, you’ll find the nation’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Admittedly, these notices of legal requirements don’t have the same classical or poetic resonance as phrases like “e pluribus unum” (Latin for “from out of many, one”) or the Declaration of Independence’s far ahead of its time and still-striking proclamation that we are all “created equal,” but the posters on their own prosaic way express the same values.

If you look beyond the bureaucratic-sounding boilerplate, perhaps you’ll see expressions that our nation is committed to fighting the injustice of unfair treatment on the basis of race, gender, nationality, religion, age, disability and other diversity and inclusion factors. You will find commitments to safety, health, equal pay and other factors that help create a decent workplace.

You may even find a surprise, as I recently did. As news accounts were breathlessly reporting and analyzing a recent Supreme Court’s decision allowing police to take DNA samples from those they arrest, I happened to notice an EEOC poster’s description of a 2009 law likely known to a few people, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. It bars employers from requiring workers to provide genetic data, treating them unequally based on such data, or disclosing such data to others.

The lesson I draw from the bulletin board posters is fairly basic: the values of diversity and inclusion in the workplace are not only issues of compliance with government mandates (although smart employers surely understand they need to pay attention to them on those grounds), but also ways to build better, more efficient and humane workplaces. Properly understood and carried out, these values will build mutual respect and understanding among co-workers, and make our nation a better, strong place.

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