Product Demo

Inclusively Advocate Portal Demo

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Please enjoy our Advocate Portal demo (transcript below).

Live Demo Transcript

Ross Barchacky  0:00  
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you’re all doing well today. My name is Ross Barchacky and I’m from Inclusively and today I’m going to be giving you a walkthrough on some of the services that we offer some of the opportunities that we have available on our site and then also how to go ahead and navigate the Advocate Portal.

So without further ado, I’m Ross Barchacky, I use he, him, disabled pronouns. For a visual description, I’m a light skinned Caucasian with short brown hair wearing a navy blue Inclusively t-shirt. I’m also joined by my service dog Perrin, who as a warning, always capable of making a guest appearance. He’s apricot colored standard poodle with a coyote brown tactical style service dog vest. And I am the head of partnerships for Inclusively, which is a workforce inclusion platform that’s transforming the way that candidates with disabilities, mental health conditions and chronic illnesses connect to jobs and inclusive employers.

As I mentioned, today, I’m going to share how we empower employers to foster transparency and trust throughout the hiring process. By putting accommodations and inclusive services and benefits up front. I’m going to go over some of those new features for advocates, how you can support your job seeker such as self registration, resume editing in platform messaging, and job recommendations. Also talk about our current list of inclusive employers that are hiring right now along with some of the upskilling programs and internships that we offer through our partners as well. And then we’ll leave some time at the end for questions. So Inclusively’s mission is to unlock the power of today’s workforce by opening doors to untapped talent. I’m going to show a short video here to go ahead and get us started.

At inclusively, we believe that every person deserves the opportunity to fulfill their innate potential, both in life and in the workplace. But today’s hiring practices are keeping millions of people from rewarding careers. Like the square door you see, it only allows access to squares, screening out talent and accommodating only those who fit a very narrow mold. Inclusively helps employers open their doors to more diverse talent. Like the door you see that can change to provide access to every one. We put workplace accommodations, front and center, connecting inclusion committed organizations to talented candidates of all identities and backgrounds who are ready to find a role that’s the perfect fit. Inclusively, one front door, open to all. At Inclusively, we believe…

All right. So what are some of the systemic breakdowns that are causing this community to be overlooked? First, most companies deploy a one size fits all approach to sourcing and interviewing candidates, which you saw sort of demonstrated there in that video. Second, the algorithms that drive most modern recruiting platforms are designed to pattern match. Therefore any discrepancies in one’s background could potentially knock them out of the hiring funnel. And this has led to over 27 million candidates getting screened out of the process before it even begins. This has created a lack of trust within the disabled community since they have seen this process work though it does not necessarily work for them. And finally, access to this talent pool has historically been fragmented. There are literally 1000s of organizations across the country that are supporting our jobseekers. From the disability community, though they’re spread across advocacy groups, nonprofits, veteran service organizations, universities and state agencies that help to train, educate and prepare disabled jobseekers for the workforce. Those of you out there that have held the responsibility of job development or employer outreach, understand how difficult it can be for all parties involved, to manage those relationships with employers. On top of all this, the world we live in is continuing to evolve specifically around the prevalence of accommodations in the workplace. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in employees and candidates self disclosing their accommodation needs. This evolution of thinking has been taking place for years as the next generation of workers have been accommodated during their educational journey. And when they enter the workforce, they expect the same level of accommodation and acceptance that they found earlier in their lives.

And with 30% of the workforce fitting the federal definition of having a disability, companies will either have to adapt to the shift and start providing accommodations to their staff, or they’re gonna have a very difficult time finding the best talent in the marketplace. That’s where inclusively comes in. We meet employers where they are in their disability inclusion journey to help them develop realistic and measurable goals and then work with them to form relate and implement different ways of doing things. We work with employers through ongoing partnerships to provide trainings for the entire organization, accommodations, coaching, diverse pipeline and ongoing support, so they don’t have to feel alone and their journey is to continue to grow and diversify their organization. So how do our employer partners feel about the work that they do with Inclusively? See for yourself. These are just a few of the organizations that are partnering with Inclusively today. We have active enterprise customers all across all industries who count on Inclusively as a thought leader in disability inclusion, leveraging both our consulting services and our platform to drive results within their organization. Our customers typically join Inclusively as a means to diversify their workforce, but all of them renew and grow with us as they become as we become an embedded part of their day to day hiring decisions. We were proud of what we’ve built here at Inclusively and we’ve your employer partners is just that, as partners. As I mentioned on an earlier slide, based on the feedback that I’ve received from organizations out there that are providing career services to this community, employer relations is one of the if not the most difficult part of the placement process. Well, Inclusively has just done that for you. Additionally, we provide ways to manage your job seekers directly through our platform. Our advocate ecosystem is unsurpassed in the space. We know that some companies have relationships with few of these groups already. And we know that it’s really hard for employers to create manage these one off partnerships as well as to maintain them. When our employers partner with us, they have access to candidates from over 950 advocacy, nonprofits, universities and government agencies who are on the frontlines of training and development for this community. These organizations leverage Inclusively use technology to do the great work they’re already doing. But we’ve expanded access directly into our close inclusive employer network. There are many ways to partner with these organizations. But a few ways that we do are, we give them access to our Advocate Portal to facilitate employment services that you’re already offering for those you serve, which I’m going to go through a short demo of here in a moment. We can do joint events such as job fairs and webinars, we have the ability to showcase some of your training opportunities, services and events to our expansive network of employers and job seekers.

For instance, we work with the Blind Institute of Technology to offer Salesforce certification courses free of charge. We work with the Bridge Academy to offer cybersecurity certifications. We work with nonprofit organizations such as Anvaya Feats to offer virtual internships that offer several different tracks to prepare job seekers for corporate America, and many more. Special price, we also offer special pricing for our partner organizations that want to also become part of our inclusive inclusive employer network, to utilize the network of job seekers that we have to fill their own internal roles. So what I’d like to do now is actually take you through a demo of the Advocate Portal and show you exactly how that works. So when you come on to Inclusively portal, you’ll have the opportunity to join either as a job seeker and look at our many careers. Or if you work, let’s say as a unit in the university career offices or for a nonprofit, maybe as a job developer or a job coach, you can actually come on and create what’s called an advocate profile, which will allow you to have a lot of the same functionality that our job seekers possess, with the added ability to then attribute some of those job seekers to yourself within the profile so you can help manage them. And as I mentioned, do the same work you’re already doing. But through the utilization of our platform. So as an advocate, when you log in and you create your profile, this is what you will see here. Just to quickly orient you, you’ll be able to see all of the candidates that you currently have. We possess in platform messaging so that you can keep communications with the candidates that you serve, regardless of where they are, as well as community updates for community that we have here to Inclusively where individuals are able to come on share thoughts, resources and have open discussions about disability inclusion in the workplace.

So I want to take you through what it looks like to manage your candidates directly here on the Inclusively platform. So once your Inclusively candidate has created an account, you are able to come up here to the search bar search for them and request access to help manage their profile. Once your candidate has allowed you to manage help manage their profile they will show up here under your active candidates. So we’ll take a look here at Jane Riddle, and we are able to see everything that she is working on in her profile. And just what was the ability to make any suggestions or updates. As I mentioned, many of the advocates that we have on our portal are career counselors, or maybe individuals that run resume writing workshops. And so they’re able to come on here and actually make real time suggestions both at what types of jobs and opportunities the candidates are looking at and connecting with, as well as how their resume looks, what experience they’re highlighting keywords and things like that, that can help make them more successful in their job search. So as you can see here, you’re able to quickly get a glance at Jane’s profile, you can see that she’s looking for mid-level positions she’s actively looking right now has not secured employment, or is maybe looking to make a career change, and then also that she is currently being managed by you as her advocate. One of the unique things about Inclusively is that we’re able to capture the story of our candidates directly into their profile. So when recruiters and hiring managers are going through from these organizations and looking at our candidate base, they’re able to see past the resume and take a look because we understand that individuals from this community will often have a non traditional career path may be frequent breaks within their career, or other discrepancies. And so having the ability to tell their story allows them to sort of share with them why their resume might not look like everyone else’s, and why that’s a good thing. So we’re able to see any of the work experience or education that Jane has put in here, we’re able to see what success enablers she has had. So here and Inclusively, we use the term Success Enablers as opposed to accommodations, although they are synonymous with one another. And when somebody is coming onto the platform to develop their profile as a job seeker, they’re able to put directly up front what they need in the workplace in order to be successful. So for Jane, that’s accessible parking spaces, the ability to have remote work, Jane has a service animal and utilizes a screen reader. And so those are things that the employer can know directly up front how they can support Jane in the new role that she is looking at applying for. We can also take a look and have if Jane has started applying to any positions they will show up here, which I have heard to be very helpful because a lot of the times, individuals especially starting out on their career, job titles can vary from organization to organization. So you all as job developers, and career coaches and advocates are able to help make recommendations saying, you know that maybe this would be a better fit based off of your current experience and qualifications.

Or maybe you’re you feel like you’re selling yourself short, and you should be applying for that senior position. And so all of that can be done directly here through the platform as well. We also have in-platform messaging, as I mentioned, to where you as the advocate can keep track of all of your communications that revolve around career opportunities for your candidates. So here, you also have the ability to share job recommendations. So if you’re looking through and knew that Jane just finished her a Java certification course, and you saw this new role that one of our employer partners has, and you think you’d be great, you can go ahead and share that directly through the platform as well. And then lastly, any relevant notifications that you would get from any of your candidates that you’re currently working with will show up directly in your notification bar. So I want to show as well, what it looks like to search through our employer network here. And the different some of the different employers that we have on our platform. So you are able to come here and take a look at all the different employers that we are partnering with here and Inclusively currently that have job positions available and posted on our site. All of our employer partners, as I mentioned in the presentation, have gone through Inclusively’s  training. We’ve worked with them to look at their accommodations process and how they interact with clients and really just how they interface with potential job seekers. And so you’re able to come here, let’s take a look at a center. And this is a place where all of our employer partners are able to sort of highlight what it is that they are doing. Specifically within the realm of disability inclusion, you can take a look at some of the more common Success Enablers that are requested and available for that employer. And then you can also take a look at some of the recognitions that they have among community. So here you can see that Accenture was recognized by disability in in their disability equality index, you can see that they’re a member of the National Organization on Disability. They’re recognized by the Valuable 500. And then lastly, you can also see some of the key roles that a center is looking for right now. So for those who are ready to sort of hit the ground running make a maybe mid career career change, we have a lot of different professional opportunities for them, either to start in the workforce or make that career change, although something unique to Inclusively as well is that we leverage our relationships with all of these partners to make the training opportunities, apprenticeships and internships also available to this community as well. So you’re able to come on to the platform, choose a different job category, if you know exactly where your job seekers are, you know, interested in going if they’re interested in getting into marketing, PR, or other creative roles, they can search specifically for that. Or if they were taking a look at maybe just having an internship, maybe they’re a college student that’s in their junior senior year, or you’ve recently graduated and looking to sort of break into the corporate world, they’re able to come here and take a look at all of our internships that our employer partners have posted here as well.

One of the other things I would like to mention is when a candidate signs up on Inclusively, they’re able to directly put in what Success Enablers they need to be successful. But we also understand that those things can change and evolve. So they also have the ability to search through all the different positions based off of the accommodations that they require for the workplace. As I mentioned, we’re able to look at internships, apprenticeships, training programs, we have part-time, full-time, contract work, to facilitate anyone who’s looking to further their career journey. We also get asked a lot, what experience levels we cater to, it is true that the majority of our candidates do fall within that entry and mid-level, sort of bracket. And a good reason for that is because there are traditionally been a lot of barriers to employment. So we do have employers posting a lot of different opportunities to help those in those entry and mid-level positions. But we also have senior executive and C-suite positions available as well on our on our site. And then lastly, if they’re in here and looking through the company pages and maybe took a look at Delta and really liked their culture, or read about their employee resource group for people with disabilities knew they wanted to be a part of delta, but maybe not sure what role might be a good fit, we can categorize those opportunities specifically for an employer. And then lastly, we have our Community Portal, our Community Portal is actually in the process of changing which I was thinking that it was going to be up to date, but it looks like it’s probably going to launch tomorrow. But essentially our Community Portal, what that’s going to allow all everyone to do is to come together, share thoughts, ideas, have conversations specifically around disability inclusion in the workplace, and then also to share resources with one another. And it will be open to employers, it will be open to job seekers as well as advocates and community partners as well. So short and sweet. I’m hoping that I was able to answer some of your questions that you have out there about how to utilize the platform and some of the benefits that we have. I would like to leave some time open here for any questions that anyone might have out there in the audience and see if we can’t get them answered. And then also I would like to, of course make myself available. You know, by all means, [email protected] is my email address, you can feel free to reach out directly to me with any questions that you might think of later as well.

Let’s see here. So we have how much does it cost an employer to utilize the inclusively platform? Great question. In the answer is it varies pretty greatly. Because we cater to organizations of all sizes from small nonprofits looking to diversify their workforce all the way up to you know large enterprise organizations it can really They differ. I will say that, you know, one of the things that makes inclusively sort of unique in the space is that we don’t offer, you know, limited job postings like some of the other solutions out there might are job boards where maybe you can post this amount of jobs for, you know, this amount of time. And what we find is that that’s, that leads to employers having to make the decision of where they best think somebody with a disability would fit in within their organization and inclusively. We believe that all opportunities should be made available to this community. So we do that specifically, by having unlimited placements, we have unlimited job openings that can get posted on our website, we don’t restrict any of that all of our training, and everything is included in an annual partnership. And if anyone out there is interested in finding out more, you know, I’d be more than happy you can reach out directly to me, [email protected]. And I’d be happy to send you over to somebody on our team that can help with that. Like I saw another question there.

Let’s see here. Says I’ve found that some screening sites have blind, inaccessible software. What can you do about that? I’m not really sure. I’m assuming that you’re talking about maybe some other sites that are that are out there that have to deal with an employment journey, like applicant tracking systems or job boards or things like that. You know, I’m, as far as Inclusively goes in with our platform, one of the reasons that we really exist in the first place is because the industry the hiring industry is so fragmented in the rules around really accessibility are still, in practice, best practices are still being developed. So what Inclusively allows all of our partners to do is to have this one centralized place where they can interact with employers, and they don’t have to utilize sites that have not been vetted specifically for accessibility. Hope that answers your question. I would love to elaborate that. On that for anyone else.

Any other questions? Is there a cost for the job seeker to create a profile? Great question. Absolutely not. We do not charge for job seekers to utilize our platform. It’s completely free of charge, in the same with our partner organizations, so universities, nonprofits, governmental organizations, are all able to come on create an advocate profile partner with us. And it’s absolutely free of charge.

We have a question here. Do employers have to be of a specific size or reach? Can it be a small local employer? I guess small was a relative term, I wouldn’t say that. You know, right now, we generally cater to organizations that are of sizes, usually 200 employees and larger. And really, the reason for that is just because of sort of how we interact with organizations and how we integrate it all different levels. We are actually in the works right now of creating sort of a more self serve ability, where you will be able to utilize a lot of the trainings and the things that we offer directly here in the platform. Because right now they are delivered live and one on one. So to answer your question, not currently, for some of the smaller small businesses and things like that, but it is an offering that we are working on, you know, recognizing that there are a lot of small businesses out there that really want to take a look at their current DEI practices and how they can you know, sort of improve upon them. Great question.

See, we have does your staff call a job secret directly after reviewing someone’s profile or discuss a specific job or do all calls come from the employer? So yes, we facilitate conversations between the job seeker and the employer so Inclusively itself while we do have the ability to have sort of a help desk, where candidates are soon going to be able to come in and ask questions if they’re having difficulty either utilizing the platform or maybe need some help with the process. But as far as job opportunities go and you know, getting calls back and things like that all of those are yes, handled directly from the recruiter, we just act as an intermediary between them. Good question.

Any other questions out there?

Well, as I mentioned, please feel free to reach out with me to me. And you know, if you have any additional follow up questions that you would like to ask, or if you are interested in potentially seeing how you can join as an advocate, and utilize our platform, or if you would like to see if maybe your organization would like to come on as an exclusively partner. I missed questions.

As a vocational rehabilitation counselor, do, I need to get consent from my clients in order for them to use the site. So they would actually have to go in and create their own account, and then you would link up between the two. So essentially, what would happen is you would create an advocate account, your client would create a job seeker account, and then you would attribute your job seeker underneath your sort of umbrella of job seekers that you serve within the platform. So it would be no different than utilizing any other sort of software tool to help in their job search, the only differences that we allow you to manage their profile, and they do have to give consent to that. So when they they’ll receive a notification that you want, essentially the ability to manage their profile with them. And then they can either accept or deny that request. Is it inclusively platform JAWS accessible? Definitely. Yes, we work with several different partners that we have that work specifically in the blind and low vision community, the NFB, the AFP, Be My Eyes. And so we have definitely been sort of went through the wringer as far as accessibility goes with screen readers.

And the other one is there is there a cost for an advocate account? There there is not. There is not, the only cost that would and let me say the only cost that would come is we do have some organizations out there that we partner with the Muscular Dystrophy Association being one of them that chooses to utilize our, our platform both to help fill their internal roles, as well as to help their constituents the individuals that they serve, to find employment as well. But we do offer special pricing for that for those organizations that choose to utilize us on both sides.

In the last one, how secure is the Inclusively platform? When working with clients personal personnel disability and health information, etc? We have to follow certain code of ethics record record management rules, etc. And just curious, yes, very secure. You know, we have employer partners, you know, from from across the entire gamut. And we definitely get put through the wringer when it comes to security. And we take it very seriously here Inclusively, especially, you know, when we understand the types of records and even just the vulnerability that these individuals are making coming and sharing this information with the community. So we take it very seriously. And, you know, for those of you that would like to come on board, if there’s, you know, some more specific questions that I can answer about how we secure our platform, I’d be more than happy to do that as well.

How many employer partners do you have? We’re currently at around 60. And the majority of those employer partners are enterprise organizations, meaning they have 10,000 or more employees. And so I believe we have about 10,000 open roles on our platform right now. And those include, you know, career opportunities, internships, apprenticeships, training programs and things like that. For organizations that are out there that have training programs that they offer to the community at no cost. An example of that would be the nonprofit I mentioned Anvaya Feats earlier they can come on and we would be happy to share that opportunity with the community. Anvaya Feats offers a virtual internship or apprenticeship rather, where individuals can go through a 12 week program and come out the other end with a certification in a specific industry. And so if there’s organizations out there that have, you know, opportunities like that, that they would like to help get the word out about that is something that we also offer our partners free of charge

How many job seekers do we have enrolled? We have about 40,000 that are right now currently active on our platform, looking for their their next opportunity. I will say that we do things a little bit differently than maybe some of the other job boards out there. You know, we don’t mass advertise. So we don’t have a lot of sort of individual signups that results in, you know, hundreds of 1000s of current applicants, what we do instead is we leverage the network of partners that already exist out there that are already doing the work, the Department of Veterans Affairs, universities, Disability Services, offices, you know, nonprofit organizations, like Best Buddies, Easterseals. And what we do is when we bring on a new employer partner, we really lean on that network to be able to provide our employers with sort of this curated list of individuals that are qualified for the position. And so the way that we might do that is when we have a new opportunity pop up, let’s say specifically within the realm of an entry-level, IT role for one of our employer partners, we can reach out to all the different Inclusively partners that we have in reach out to them, because they’re the ones that know best, what job seekers they have that are currently looking for their next opportunity. So example of that would be maybe someone at the Department of Affairs is working with Jessica and Jessica is in the middle of transitioning from the service has a disability and just finished learning how to be code Python will say. So when we come out with a new employer opportunity, it gets blasted out to our network, it will be able to see that and then they encourage them to come on and apply specifically for that platform.

How many, how many partner advocates do we have? So we currently have 950 different organizations that we work with. And from there we have individual advocate users that come on and utilize the platform as well.

Always looking to grow, as well.

Any other questions? These are great. Wonderful, well, of course, and as I mentioned, you know, shoot me an email, find me on LinkedIn, come up, create a free account. And if there’s anything else that we can do to assist, great, we’ll be hosting these about once a month, here at Inclusively. So if you have anyone else that you would like to refer or as new updates come out to the Advocate Portal or the candidate experience we’ll be keeping up to date here. Otherwise, thank you all very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and holiday season. Thank you.

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