Alternative Hiring Opportunities Panel Discussion

Description

Join the ARCC for a discussion on Alternative Hiring Opportunities to address and reduce the impact of hiring shortages that our business community has been facing. Our panelists will share information about alternative avenues to find and hire quality candidates for employment that may have not been considered. 

Meet our Speakers:

Sergeant Major Christopher Thomas (U.S. Marine Corps, Retired) Elite 9 Veteran Talent Acquisition Services
Chris Thomas is the founder and owner of Elite 9 Veteran Talent Acquisition Services, LLC, a recruiting and management consulting firm located Upstate New York.  He is a strategic and thoughtful senior executive leader with over 20 years of hands-on experience in the United States Marine Corps emphasizing innovation and creativity in solving complex problems.

He has proven superior success in developing and leading diverse talent acquisition teams that achieve outstanding results. Through human resource management concepts and innovative leadership methodologies he has delivered impactful results for managing large-scale organizations of several hundred personnel
 
Chris is a combat veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), is the treasurer of the Marine Corps League Memorial Detachment 2 located in Hudson Falls, NY.  Additionally, he holds a Master in Public Administration, is a Resilience-Team Building Leadership Professional Trainer, an adjunct instructor for the United States Marine Corps where he teaches professional leadership development and the graduate of numerous executive level leadership courses.  Lastly, he is an Everything DiSC personality assessment certified practitioner.


Michelle Treffi - Director of Employment Programs, Community Work & Independence
Michelle grew up in Barre, MA before moving to Bennington, VT to pursue her education in Psychology.  Michelle is a 2004 graduate from Southern Vermont College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in Social Work.
 

Michelle got her start in Vocational Rehabilitation working at Liberty House, before joining the CWI team in 2012.  Here, Michelle started as an Employment Counselor, supporting individuals with varying abilities to find and maintain employment.  She worked her way into a management position, as a Day and Employment Services Manager, overseeing operations of multiple day habilitation sites as well as a community pre-vocational program.  This experience led her to her current position as Director of Employment Programs. 


Timothy McNutt, Esq., as director of Cornell University’s Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative at the ILR School, uses his extensive background in criminal law, litigation, and policy to assist people with criminal records in reducing barriers to reentry and improving employment outcomes. A major focus of his work is the use of criminal records as a screening device for employment, the impact of employment on reducing recidivism, employer attitudes toward hiring people with criminal records, and the collateral consequences of incarceration. Mr. McNutt is a former prosecutor with over eight years of experience, most recently with the New York State Attorney General’s Office.



Dr. Richard Leach
Dr. Richard Leach is an Internist, Infectious Disease consultant, and Travel and Tropical Medicine expert, now retired and living in Queensbury where he tends his gardens. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English in 1965, then from the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry with an MD in 1971. After medical school, he trained in Internal Medicine at the Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown for 3 years, then studied Infectious Diseases for 3 years at the University of Kentucky’s Medical Center in Lexington.

He moved to Glens Falls in 1977 and set up his private practice in the Irongate Center and the Glens Falls Hospital. He served as the GFH’s Infection Control Officer and Hospital Epidemiologist. He was the Medical Director of Warren County’s Department of Public Health, the consultant to its Tuberculosis Program and the director of its Travel Medicine Clinic.

Dr. Leach is also known as co-founder and president of The Adirondack AIDS Task Force in the 1980s and 90s, as the founder and president of The Glens Falls Medical Mission and its Project Guatemala in the mid-1990s, as the developer of the Glens Falls Mask-a-teer Task Force in the first year of the COVID pandemic, and as co-founder and current chairman of the Adirondack Welcome Circle.