« I learned to speak with different hiring managers about hiring people with disabilities»
Ed Wong has over 20 years of experience in recruitment, sales and advertising. During the late 1990s, Ed worked at a now-defunct website called Yahoo! HotJobs where people could search online for jobs. He worked with Fortune 1000 companies who wanted to place their job advertisements on the website.
Several years later, Ed became the first citywide Recruiter for the City and County of San Francisco. One of Ed’s projects was to employ people with disabilities. Ed began learning about the blindness community. Getting to know blind jobseekers with different work histories made him better at his job. “I learned to speak with different hiring managers about hiring people with disabilities,” he elaborates.
Ed is now an Employment Specialist for the LightHouse for the Blind and works with blind students who are looking for jobs. Besides teaching the fundamentals of resume writing and job interviewing skills, Ed also serves as a career mentor. He understands that being unemployed is frustrating. “A lot of people identify their worth with employment and it’s detrimental when they aren’t employed,” he remarks. Ed is passionate about supporting blind jobseekers and helping them secure employment in the competitive job market.