Best Places to Work: Staffing

When the nation’s mortgage industry tanked in 2007, so did Bruce Manus’ hopes for finding another job.

Manus sold home mortgages over the phone for five years. He was good at it, and after speaking with him, it’s easy to see why: He’s courteous, patient, doesn’t interrupt. He listens.

But when Manus was laid off in 2009, he was 51 years old and nobody in the real estate business was hiring. In addition, Manus has retinitis pigmentosa, a slowly progressing disease affecting the back of the inner eye, blocking nearly all his vision except for light.

Manus, who lives independently in Painesville, persevered and continued to search for work. In early March, he found the website for Akron-based telemarketing company InfoCision Management Corp. Through a partnership with the Cleveland Sight Center, the company was interested in hiring people like him. Also in Manus’ favor, he had used special screen-reading software at the mortgage company and had telephone sales skills. He was hired in June as a volunteer recruiter for one of InfoCision’s nonprofit clients.

“[Selling mortgages] wasn’t as detail-oriented as InfoCision is,” Manus says, laughing. “My head hurt after the first day of training.”

Manus’ five weeks of job training was coordinated by the Cleveland Sight Center. The program is just one of several connections the company has with Northeast Ohio organizations to diversify the abilities and backgrounds of its 4,300 employees and growing workforce.

“We benefit from having people with different points of reference, different ideas, and it gives us a better company overall,” says Steve Brubaker, InfoCision’s chief of staff, the senior human resources position at the company, which has 35 call centers in 13 locations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Manus’ symptoms started in the late 1990s. He was a cashier at a big-box retailer and began giving customers incorrect change too often. He was transferred to a different department, but shortly after Christmas one year, he was laid off with the holiday part-timers.

The Sight Center, along with job training and placement, was invaluable helping him adjust to a new way of living and being self-sufficient. “I couldn’t have done it without them,” Manus says.

InfoCision’s partnership with the Sight Center started in January after members from each human resources staff met at a business-networking event. They realized that some of the Sight Center’s clients could be valuable additions to InfoCision’s workforce, especially its work-at-home staff, Brubaker says.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the way it’s gone,” says Brubaker. InfoCision has 11 visually impaired employees, with the goal of hiring 25 by the end of fall. “We’re taking our time in hiring to make sure we provide excellent training and a great support system,” says Brubaker.

InfoCision’s commitment to hire visually impaired and physically challenged workers has been recognized by the Governor’s Council on People with Disabilities, Vision and Vocational Services.  

The company also works with Cleveland’s El Barrio West Side Ecumenical Ministry, specifically on job placement of Latin Americans.

But InfoCision’s human resources staff doesn’t wait until these organizations contact them, Brubaker says. The company created a diversity council to locate nonprofit groups to help recruit diverse workers.

InfoCision has also enrolled employees in The Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio’s LeadDiversity program, in which staffing professionals from companies conduct site visits, seminars and have discussions with Northeast Ohio leaders and policymakers about hiring practices.

“From the top on down, we’re dedicated to this,” says Brubaker.

These efforts mean more than just a steady paycheck for employees like Manus, who as of late July had been working from home for a couple weeks.

“I wish they had a program like this earlier when I started to lose my vision,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been so uptight and nervous, not knowing what I was going to do with myself.”