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Employer Success Stories
Minnesota: Goldenflow Studios
Kao Thao is Hmong and relocated from Wat Tham Krabok refugee camp in Thailand to Minneapolis, MN, USA in 2004. He worked as a silversmith prior to coming to the U.S. With limited English skills and no work experience in the U.S., Kao enlisted the help of Hmong American Partnership (HAP) with his job search efforts.
After completing an employment assessment and identifying Kao’s career goals, employment specialist Eric Bestrom chose to do a geographical job search. Eric explained, “Kao’s relatives agreed to drive him to any job within reason.” That “within reason” caveat meant someplace in the city or in neighboring inner ring suburbs because these are the areas they were the most familiar with.
Eric used google maps to search for “manufacturing” businesses from his zip code with the nearest businesses clustered first. He found 60 possibilities and began making calls to introduce HAP’s services. Several businesses were closed, suffering hard-times, or had a tight-knit, low turnover workforce. But success came quickly according to Eric, “We had three informal interviews or company visits before finding Goldenflow Studios -- we were kind of lucky.”
An interested business owner, Dan Mather, of Goldenflow Studios, invited Kao for an interview. Immediately impressed with Kao’s attentiveness, Dan offered him a position as a finishing production assistant. This required him to grind, drill, fill, and seal the glass snowdomes from glass blanks Dan would blow. His prior work experience molding traditional Hmong silver jewelry equipped him with transferable skills in using extremely high temperatures to create works of art.
When asked what qualities convinced Dan that Kao would make a good employee, he answered, “When I first met Kao he was with a group of maybe a dozen people that Eric had brought by for me to visit with. I could tell who was visually studying the shop and the processes as I explained them to Eric. It was Kao’s curiousness that told me he had an active mind and would make an excellent candidate for training.”
In two years, Kao has added to his skills as a packager, machine operator, and glass blower. He can work along in the studio to generate an entire run of glass artworks from start to finish. Dan says that Kao’s glass-blowing skills have given him more time to focus on sales and account maintenance, two important parts of any successful business.
Reliability has been Kao’s biggest contribution to the business. In Dan’s own words, “I don't have to worry if he’ll show up and I don’t have to worry about him doing the job correctly. While I worried there would be some language barriers to training, Kao has impressed me by proving himself better able to understand and execute instructions than many of the native English speakers I've attempted to train in years past.”
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OTHER SUCCESS STORIES
Minnesota: Goldenflow Studios
Minnesota: Fairview Health Services
North Carolina: CabinetCraft
Pennsylvania: Cardone Industries
Maine: Hannaford Groceries
Texas: NAPCO Precast Limited, Inc.
New Jersey: C and S Grocers
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