Name: Mylene B. Padolina Company: Microsoft Corp. There are certainly advantages to recruiting and even actively hiring individuals with disabilities. As a company who is making products that we would like to be usable by all people we want to make sure that we have people with disabilities on our staff who will be able to help us market and help us create those products that are in fact usable by all. Aside from that insight that they bring based on their experiences we've also known that individuals with disabilities there is a high rate of retention, that's proven, they have strong creativity and problem solving skills, there's a high motivation to have a job and to be productive and those are the things that we need as a corporation to be competitive. The impact to Microsoft in terms of employing people with disabilities is the fact that we are able to make our products usable by all and let me give you an example, one of our success stories is a situation where we employed a managing editor of Encarta which is our encyclopedia and he happens to be hard of hearing and when he started with the company he thought wow this is a great product but it's a product that is multimedia so there are sound bites in addition to it being very visual and based on his community he said you know there are going to be a number of students that will not have access to this great piece of technology because they wont be able to hear the sound bites and so with his insight and experiences he was able to bring up an area that we could change and impact the community in a positive way. The current challenges that Microsoft faces as it works to hire individuals with disabilities is finding them. We have a number of positions out there that they are highly technical, there software tests are software developers and we have recruiters, hiring managers who are open to hiring people with disabilities. We currently have employees with disabilities throughout the company and it is just a matter of where are they. So our challenges today are basically how do we help the community learn about the high level of technology positions out there and how do we encourage them to pursue education and technology and be able to see and envision careers in technology. So much of my focus in helping the company is doing proactive work in terms of building that pipeline, working with youth with disabilities and increasing the amount of students going into technology starting at the grade school and high school level. Some of the things that we employ in terms of trying to get them interested and excited is having mentoring opportunities, job shadow opportunities enabling them to see employees with similar disabilities doing a wide variety of jobs and encouraging the students to envision themselves in those opportunities as well. As far as encouraging hiring managers from other companies to really take a look at individuals with disabilities as potential employees, one of the things I would suggest is that they go to Microsoft’s website, microsoft.com, if they go into our diversity page which is microsoft.com/diversity they'll be able to access a video that our corporation has developed that will highlight employees within our company with various disabilities holding a variety of jobs and highlighting the accommodations they use in the workplace. I think in terms of encouraging other managers to hire if they see the results a company like Microsoft has and are able to see employees with disabilities in the workplace with the technology that they use that enables them to do the kind of work that everybody else does it lessens the fear, that fear of the unknown, and basically diminishes the myths that are currently out there. At Microsoft first and foremost with persons with disabilities we want to ensure that they have a good working environment, an inclusive working environment so providing them with the accommodations they need at the start of their employment and throughout their career with Microsoft making sure that they have everything that they need to be on equal playing field. Aside from that our employees with disabilities can take advantage of all of the things that we offer, our total employee base in terms of advancement, mentoring opportunities, training opportunities, assignments and different work groups. Being able to do those types of things, taking advantage of the things we have to offer. We have employees with disabilities in different positions at different levels throughout the company, we have employees that are individual contributors as well as managers, we also have three employee resource groups and what we call them are diversity advisement councils and basically they are employee groups for deaf and hard of hearing employees, employees with visual impairments and we have a group for attention deficit disorder each of these groups also have executive sponsors so they have a direct connection to one of the leaders in the company in terms of their own leadership development, a sounding board for any issues that they may experience and a direct link to get their concerns distributed to other leaders within the company as well. At Microsoft we employ a wide variety of techniques in order to attract candidates with disabilities. We have gone to job fairs, we advertise in publications both in terms of online and media types of applications in order to target people with disabilities and let them know about the opportunities we have available. We also have a strong college recruiting component as well so were going out to the schools, providing internship opportunities, providing scholarship opportunities as well as full time employment. A couple of schools listed on our roster of schools is national technical institute for the deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, we have also gone to Gauludet University in Washington, D.C. so going to schools also with a high population of students with disabilities. We are also active with the community, so going to organizations that provide services and support to people with disabilities and going out there and telling them we are hiring and these are the kinds of positions we are looking for, the skill sets that we need within our company and by the way here are the things that we provide in terms of accommodations and here are the employees that we have working for us. So really employing a wide variety of avenues to get the word out, to let people know what we have, that we are providing a welcoming environment and we see the value that employees with disabilities can bring to the company.