Spotlight for Career Services Professionals
Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals
During NACE16 in Chicago, conference attendees joined 2015-16 NACE President Dawn Carter and members of the NACE Board of Directors in the NACE 60th Anniversary Innovation Challenge. Sponsored by Intuit, the challenge allowed teams to brainstorm, problem-solve, and establish best practices around three primary themes: STEAM, students with disabilities, and leveraging the liberal arts degree. The winning teams’ submissions will be covered in this and future issues of Spotlight.
A team composed of Pam Webster of Enterprise Holdings, Diane Spizzirro of Columbia University, Cathy Schwabauer of the University of Kansas, and Ailina Heim of Intuit addressed the challenges in engaging, providing information to, and recruiting students with disabilities. Its winning entry mapped out a series of events to exchange ideas and information among multiple stakeholders, and that would overcome the lack of communication and information about disability services.
“We are all stakeholders, but the communication is silent,” the group noted.
The team’s solution—titled PRISM—would include:
- Partnership
- Resources
- Increased transparency
- Shining the light on Multiple perspectives and disabilities
This yearlong program would be spearheaded through career services with collaboration with two or three key employer partners, students with and without disabilities, disability services, and veterans/Wounded Warriors.
The program would kick off with a roundtable discussion among all stakeholders, and invite all students to call in to listen to the discussion. The group would develop a plan to hold virtual webinars that would include employer panels for a student audience, disability services for an employer audience, students with disabilities sharing successes, and student panels discussing their challenges and concerns.
“Because they are webinars, students who don’t want to identify are able to get information without disclosing their disability,” the group noted.
The program would culminate with a “meet the firm” event during which disability friendly employers would come to network with students in a comfortable environment.