The BuzzzApril, 2009

In this issue:

Did you know?

We chose the honey bee to represent GettingHired.com because throughout history, the honey bee has been an enduring symbol of industry, productivity, and prosperity. Though there are thousands of bees in a hive, each individual's contribution to the community is vital to the hive's success.

Career Advice

Should You Tell, or Not? How? And When? And, What If You Don't? Then What?

The title says it all. These are the questions that wake people with disabilities up in the middle of the night. I can remember the what-ifs going round and round inside my head while I wondered if I would ever find a job, and just about every person with a disability I've ever known has wrestled with the likely consequences of these decisions and wondered what to do.

It was the summer of 1968. The lady behind the desk at Snelling and Snelling was flustered. I could tell, she had never met a person who was blind before. She had never even thought about meeting a person who was blind, much less finding that person a job. She needed some eye contact, but I couldn't provide that, and I had already explained, as politely as I could, that she needed to talk to me, not my sister who had given me a ride to her office, because it was I who was looking for a job. My sister, a nurse, already had one.

Thinking about that meeting now, I feel kind of sorry for her. It was pretty unusual back then for a blind woman to come to Snelling and Snelling, looking for a full-time, permanent job, and if that blind woman arrived with a recently-acquired bachelor's degree in International Studies, well, I'm sure the career counselor found the challenge more than daunting.. Jobs had seemed to gravitate naturally toward my classmates. Some had even been recruited months before graduation, right after the Christmas holidays. But, although I had traveled to DC with a friend and we had walked around the Federal Triangle and visited the IRS, and the DOJ, and I can't remember now which other federal agencies we visited, and although I had followed their personnel departments' advice to fill out my FS-171 (the federal job application form back then), although I had some recent job experience (at a summer camp for children who were blind), and I had a decent GPA, and I was articulate, knowledgeable about the Communist bloc among other things, and eager to work, summer was winding down, and no one had come knocking on my door, or responded in any way to my job applications. My sister and her friends thought that Snelling and Snelling might be my ticket to work. They all had friends who had had good luck with the employment agency.

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