2022-10-27 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board October 27, 2022 MR. LEOPOLDINO: Yeah. So, all the above. A more recent opportunity that fell into our laps—and we recently signed up for is called the "Handshake"I don't know if you guys know what the Handshake Program, but it—are you familiar, Kate, with that? So, it's a social—it's, sort of, like, a social media platform only for higher education institutions across the nation. And so, this is one way for employers and these institutions to have a connection and they're still, kind of, ironing out the bugs `cause I hear a lot of complaints about it. But it's a great opportunity because you get invited to virtual job fairs, which we normally would not have access to, right. So, maybe, we got invited to the University of Washington's virtual job fair for IT professionals. That's something that we could take advantage of virtually and our department head for DIT can attend—speakers that they might want to come into the school to talk about us as an employer. Sitting on advisory board—I currently sit on the Community College Business and Technology Advisory Board and, recently, we had a discussion about curriculum development. So, yes, we are getting out there and that comment was specifically for the Handshake Program because we've already seen tremendous opportunities for us, not to only recruit statewide, but on the West Coast for students that may want to come back home and are not familiar with what the County has to offer. So, as they iron out kinks, we're kind of working closely with them on how we can maximize the benefit there. MS. DE SOTO: Thank you for sharing some of that. I think from the realm that I come in— come from with the university and learning more through this Board about how the HR world and how things work, I think that's that sometimes there's a gap between education systems what they produce as a final outcome versus what is translated into minimum qualifications. MR. LEOPOLDINO: Yes. MS. DE SOTO: And sometimes there seems to be a gap there. And I know the education world is very motivated to gear itself to making sure its graduates can find jobs, right. So, I just think that gap is really interesting and as you're talking about these kind of innovative ways of working with recruitment, I think there's a lot of conversations to be had about making sure both sectors are being—working together. MR. LEOPOLDINO: Yeah. And we attended the UH Manoa's Engineering Expo and what we learned was the engineering expo is the largest career fair on that campus—larger than business education. And about 800 students came through and we talked to—geez, I don't know—maybe close to 100 students. I traveled there along with our director of environmental management, an engineer from public works—and among the three of us, we talked to a ton of students and just, kind of, got their feedback on what they feel is important to them. It's definitely not retirement and health Page 16