Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Ninh Tran Of Snaprillia On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability
An Interview With Eric Pines
Do the right thing. It never gets old. & “Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your customers and users.”
As we all know, over the past several years there has been a great deal of discussion about inclusion and diversity in the workplace. One aspect of inclusion that is not discussed enough, is how businesses can be inclusive of people with disabilities. We know that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. What exactly does this look like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about “How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Are Disabled “.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ninh Tran.
Ninh Tran is the CEO of Snapbrillia and Google alumni. He is passionate about decentralizing opportunities and helping people build and own their economic identities. His last company HireEZ drove millions of hires yearly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, Visa, and Mastercard. Now he’s on a mission to get self-taught and underrepresented people into tech and web3. Reach Ninh anywhere: https://wwwlinktr.ee/ninhtran
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
How did I get here?… My entrepreneurship journey began when I was a student at UC Berkeley with my first venture, Trucksome, a food truck ordering app for the San Francisco Bay Area. That was where my love for startups that solve real-world problems began — we were a scrappy team of UC Berkeley engineers and hackers passionate about the product’s potential to revolutionize neighborhoods and cities. Food trucks often hired people from their communities, despite having a record in their backgrounds, as long as they could cook or serve food and worked hard. After four years at Trucksome and a stint on Google’s Quality Engineering team, I co-founded Hiretual, now known as HireEZ. This company sparked my love for the hiring space and acquainted me with diversity and hiring process issues that inspired my current company, Snapbrillia. The lessons I learned at HireEZ, and growing it into the #1 recruiting AI SaaS company in the world — particularly getting involved in all aspects of the company, from the product, operations, marketing, and sales to customer success–made me the entrepreneur I am today. It gave me invaluable industry knowledge on ethical AI and AI-enabled hiring that I’ve brought to my best and most impactful venture yet.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Passion
Focus
Perseverance
All when I realized the bias within the hiring system, I gained the passion for doing something about it. I became very focused on how I could do something about it.
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work-related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
A struggle I’ve faced with the first AI-enabled hiring software that powered hiring processes at big tech companies, I was able to help companies hire millions of people every year–but there was still a piece missing. Underrepresented groups were 50% more likely to get rejected automatically at the top of the hiring funnel, even before their first interviews and at times even being effectively disqualified 95% of times. I have seen friends and family from underrepresented groups work five times harder to get the same opportunities, recognition, and acknowledgment in meetings that privileged groups often take for granted. Knowing that there were still such extreme gaps in the tech industry affecting communities I cared about despite all the work I had put in with HireEZ, all the work I had spent trying to understand and optimize hiring funnels was the spark I needed to venture out and build something new for me in my entrepreneurship journey. Somehow, in the solution I had created and the product I had spent six years building and scaling, I had missed a key part of the problem — creating an alternative path of accessing opportunities for those who usually wouldn’t be able to access them. I do this now, and I have the best job ever.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
Decentralized Identity and Proof of Reputation to enable more trust for companies to hire performers from underrepresented and self-taught backgrounds globally where opportunities are scarce, and background checks and employment verifications are not readily available.
Also, we’ve been working with the great Jennifer Van Riet for some time on an amazing white paper, “Improving DEI In Systematic Hiring”, that we are preparing to publish at Snapbrillia in the near future.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about inclusion. Can you tell our readers about your experience working with initiatives to promote Diversity and Inclusion? Can you share a story with us?
Yes! From the beginning, my passion for DEI was driven by seeing systematic bias in the hiring process. I want all underrepresented groups to have representation, so I founded Trucksome, which gives not only previously incarcerated people opportunities for employment but also empowers locals to work in their local food economies.
Now with putting Snapbrillia on the map, we want to bring a more diverse and inclusive space to the tech industry where opportunities are not limited to the majority.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you explain to our readers why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
Having an inclusive company culture is very important because it gives everyone in the workplace a sense of purpose for being there and feeling included in projects and tasks of the company. You also gain better leverage over your competitors by gaining deeper trust from your employees and a commitment of loyal, hardworking employees.
A diverse and inclusive workplace can benefit by:
- Reducing the risk of high turnover rates.
- Having better employees.
- Enhanced creativity & innovation.
- Higher employee morale.
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what this looks like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Can you please share a few examples?
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has set standards that prohibit discrimination against those disabled. Requires employers with 15 or more employees to accommodate candidates and employees with disabilities. Although not obligated to accommodate all requests from employees, it’s recommended that they still offer alternatives that can be as effective.
Some reasonable accommodations can be:
- Recognize any unconscious bias exclusion terms against those of the disabled.
- Interact with those of the disabled in and outside of work.
- Take time to incorporate accessibility and inclusion for the disabled into your work culture.
- Advocate for solutions that could be helpful for the disabled community to be included in the workplace.
Aside from what is legally required, what best practices can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities?
Proactively addressing our inner bias can help create a welcoming environment that’s true to your inclusive company culture. A lot of time, your internal bias can set you up for failure.
Ex: Most companies hire off judgments using unconscious shortcuts that aren’t related to the skill sets for the position at hand.
Can you share a few examples of ideas implemented at your workplace to help promote disability inclusion? Can you share with us how the work culture was impacted?
Remote work helps engage with different communities of backgrounds and cultures to strengthen the hiring pipeline to promote disability inclusion, having a culture where everyone is encouraged to participate in meetings, communicate and ask for help, and take care of themselves is important to promote inclusion for those team members who are neurodiverse and others with physical disabilities.
We keep training programs ongoing to help the disabled keep developing and succeeding within their positions. Having mentorship initiatives for your teams is vital to keep your employees engaged and learning. We’ve developed a mutually supportive community at Snapbrillia, employees knowing they can bring their entire selves to work should mean even with their disabilities feel comfortable about not having to worry about being treated differently.
This is our signature question that we ask in many of our interviews. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started My Career”?
Do the right thing. It never gets old. & “Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your customers and users.”
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your life?
Take care of yourself; otherwise, you won’t be able to take care of anything else. Story of burning out at my last startup, so I had to scale back on my time but then could find balance and now constantly push the boundaries of balancing energy, time, and work demands.
“Stay humble before God.”
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If I could inspire a movement right now, it would be what I’ve been putting such great energy into, creating a space within the tech industry that creates space for minorities and others to be seen and included. Disrupting bias and breaking barriers of the systematic hiring system.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Ninh:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninhtran08/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ninhtran09
Facebook (Metaverse): https://www.facebook.com/ninhtran08
Snapbrillia:
Our Website: https://www.snapbrillia.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/snapbrillia/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/snapbrillia
Facebook (Metaverse): https://www.facebook.com/Snapbrillia
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Ninh Tran Of Snaprillia On How Businesses Make… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.