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| Nino Mecevic |
Volunteer professionals host one-on-one sessions with highly skilled and trained job-seekers to explain the current environment in their industries, review resumes, conduct mock interviews, and more. Colorado ICC promotes diversity in industries that new arrivals to the States may not even know about.
For Nino, Colorado ICC a “critical piece” of the immigrant and refugee experience in the Denver area. “The nuances of networking, filling out job applications, and completing resumes are difficult to understand for the average job seeker, let alone someone used to a different system or culture,” he says.
Nino shares more about his motivation for creating a supportive network and platform to amplify the job search efforts of immigrants and refugees.
Why did you decide to start Colorado ICC?
As an immigrant from Bosnia myself, I was always looking for ways to get involved and give back to the immigrant community. There were so many people that helped my family integrate into the United States when we came to Upstate New York in the mid-90s. After college, I spent several years as an in-home volunteer English tutor in Denver and in Upstate New York.
Over time, I gained an understanding of how immigrant integration providers (both government and non-profit) were successful at essential services like teaching English, helping with administrative tasks like obtaining a driver’s license and even helping with immediate employment. However, helping highly skilled and educated immigrants find optimal employment seemed to be a service that didn’t really exist, at least not in Denver.
Working with ESL students who had master’s degrees or with ESL students that spent years as engineers in their home countries but struggled with cultural norms while interviewing or job hunting made me realize that this was an underserved area.
By this time, I had several years of experience in the corporate world. I realized nonprofits have a hard time finding volunteers from the corporate world. It’s especially difficult for working professionals to commit to a fixed volunteering schedule when there are countless meetings that could come up at that time. I’d bet the commit rate to that type of model is fairly low. But if you flip that and say “Hey, you work in DevOps, if an immigrant comes to my organization, with a tech background and needs some job tips, would you meet with them 1-on-1 and help them out?” – the response rate is near 100% (substitute DevOps with any other function).
This is how the non-commitment model Colorado ICC uses came about. This is essentially what normal networking looks like in the United States. I know someone who can help you, I put you in touch and you grab a coffee or lunch with that person. All Colorado Immigrant Career Circle does is act as a bridge for two people who probably wouldn’t encounter each other professionally. I think that this type of service is useful to a certain subset of immigrants and refugees. That’s why I started Colorado ICC.
What are the primary offerings of Colorado Immigrant Career Circle?
We offer three key services, entirely free, all of which involve being matched with a professional volunteer in the Denver metro area: career advice coffee chats; resume reviews; and mock interviews.
As founder of the Colorado ICC, what do you enjoy most about the work you do?
I really enjoy bringing people together. It’s not just the immigrants that benefit. Our professional volunteers are exposed to new cultures, new connections, and experiences that they may not encounter through their own networks or day-to-day professional lives.
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| Colorado Immigrant Career Circle at the "I Am An Immigrant" event hosted in Aurora by FWD.us |
What do you find most challenging?
The current political environment has made things difficult. For us as an organization, difficult is a significant overstatement compared to what folks throughout the country are going through. However, it has made it harder to reach the people we want to help. We are a bootstrapped nonprofit that operates digitally without an office. Needless to say, this causes some people to pause and question where their information is going when they sign up with us. This is why we’ve been more active at community events and through other avenues, like our English conversation MeetUp group.
What are the top concerns of the people you serve?
Not surprisingly, the concerns usually come back to language. Most people are very nervous when it comes to phone interviews because they don’t think their English is up to par in a situation where it’s much more difficult to understand the other party.
In working with a diverse group of immigrants and newcomers, how does Colorado ICC conduct culturally responsive services?
In our volunteer training documents, we try to outline and address any issues that may come up. However, we always point the solution back to an accepted cultural norm in the United States. We feel that even though it may be awkward in a networking session, it’s an environment to fail freely without any downside. An example would be if a mentee asks one of our professional mentors how much they make. The mentor could side-step the question with a nonsensical answer.
However, we encourage mentors to tackle these types of situations directly by explaining that, in the case of this example, this type of question is not appropriate in the United States in most professional circumstances. Because if we don’t address culturally sensitive issues directly, the mentee could make the mistake again in an interview or in a situation where they could truly lose out, and that’s something we want to prevent.
In your opinion, what aspects of the immigrant experience are most misunderstood by mainstream hiring managers?
I don’t know that I’d call it misunderstood, but I think there is some familiarity bias in hiring that works against immigrants, specifically around the content they may have on their resumes. It’s a lot easier to recognize that someone was an HR Staffing Coordinator at a startup in Colorado than to perform due diligence on an unfamiliar sounding startup an immigrant from South America may have worked at, even though the latter example could have been a premier organization in that country. I think it’s an additional hoop immigrants have to jump through, “translating” their previous experience so it’s understood here, all the while maintaining credibility.
