Career Panel offers advice for LGBTQ+ students in the job market

Job interviews are scary for everyone — but for LGBTQ+ students, finding a job can be a traumatizing experience.

According to the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy’s 2015 report, the LGBTQ+ community faces twice the unemployment rate of the general population, with 78 percent of National Transgender Discrimination Survey respondents reporting occupational discrimination or mistreatment.

That’s why roughly 20 people attended the first-ever LGBTQ Career Panel and Interview Prep Event in the William Pitt Union Monday night as part of the Pitt Office of Career Development and Placement Assistance’s annual Career Fair Prep Week. The panel was the only part of the Career Fair Prep Week to specifically discuss LGBTQ+ issues in the job market, and how they affect students.

Topics ranged from whether to include your gender identity on your resumé, how to bring it up — or not bring it up — in an interview and how to deal with people in the professional world who exercise prejudice.

Marcus Robinson, president of Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance, organized the event with Pitt Career Consultant Jimmy Fabrizio, whom he had started communicating with over the summer.

“We realized many LGBTQIA students struggled with the job hiring process, such as whether to ‘out’ yourself on the resumé and if so, how,” Robinson, a junior anthropology and neuroscience double major, said. “It was reassuring to know that other people do struggle with it [and] that it’s a step-by-step process and not a sprint.”

Rainbow Alliance member Ava Pritts, a freshman majoring in geology, was in attendance and praised the event for offering a fresh perspective.

“I thought it was super cool to hear the experiences of different LGBTQ adults because it’s not a perspective I hear that often,” she said.

LGBTQ+ employees from PNC Bank, which the Human Rights Campaign named a Best Place to Work for LGBT Equality in 2015, comprised the panel. The speakers included Bryan Jeffers, vice president and lead product manager; Pam Marin, real estate underwriter vice president; Jerrelle Boston, operations manager and Steve Tamsula, vice president and functional controller.

Josh Stewart of PNC’s Human Resources Department moderated the event.

Another question students asked was whether including their gender identity is necessary when applying for jobs.

“Let the interviewer drive those conversations,” Boston said, before discussing the intricacies of reporting a prejudiced interviewer to a supervisor at a company. “Feedback has to occur.”

He recommended using delicate phrases ­— like “I got the feeling that …” — instead of being aggressively accusatory when dealing with a discriminatory employee.

The panel also introduced students to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a method of scoring companies based on their standing with the LGBTQ+ community, including hiring methods and benefits in the workplace.

“I had never heard of the Corporate Equality Index,” Pritts said. “And I’m really happy that exists. I know now to look out for that while looking for jobs at different places.”

Robinson also noted the index, saying “it was helpful to know about what to look for in an LGBTQIA-inclusive workplace.”

Stewart expressed concerns about discussing LGBTQ+ rights with people who are less informed in the workplace.

“The acronym is becoming more of an alphabet soup,” he said. “As it gets longer, it becomes more challenging to build awareness for what all of that means.”

This caution for patience resonated with a story Tamsula shared of an upper PNC manager, who oversees 55,000 employees, that didn’t know what the B or T stood for in LGBTQ+. Tamsula said the co-worker was genuinely curious, if just uninformed.

“Baby steps,” he called it.

Following this idea of progress, many of the panelists referred to the job process as a “journey” and compared the students’ individual journeys to that of the public as a whole.

“You’ll figure it out,” Boston said. “You’ll find a way to make it work.”