Excerpt from an interview with Chris Brandt, AtWork! CEO, on NW Focus. Click here to see the entire interview.

How Businesses Find Out About AtWork!?

We sometimes choose them and they sometimes choose us. Often it’s a testimonial from another business. We also try and do a lot of outreach to employers. AtWork! holds an annual fundraising and community event in the spring where we honor a community supporter. This year we honored Dunn Lumber who has a person with a disability working in 9 of their 12 stores and they want to hire a person with a disability in all of their stores. By having a video about Dunn Lumber’s experience hiring with people with disabilities on our website [right side, halfway down the home page] we’re reaching out to more businesses and to more employers. We’re always looking for ways to reach out and let employers know we’re here. We’re always looking at our branding and marketing.

Our vision is that in the future when employers are thinking about hiring people or looking at ways of improving productivity and efficiency they’ll think about us. This is sort of a new thing. We’ve been building towards this and in our long term vision we want to be the placement agency of the future. When an employer thinks about a job that needs to be done they will think to call AtWork! or one of the organizations all across Washington State that serves people with disabilities because they heard from someone in their Rotary or Kiwanis Club or from a business down the street that was really successful in hiring a person with disabilities in their business.