Brian Rescino has an extensive resume.
He has held 11 customer service positions in the past four years, with experience ranging from preparing food at places like Red Arrow Diner to labeling items as a store associate at Haffner’s in Gilford.
Currently, the 25-year-old Concord resident is working a combination of five jobs at once, with staggered shifts filling his schedule and amounting to a 28-hour work week.
Yet Rescino said he’s “frustrated.” As someone with autism, he has found navigating the job market to be particularly challenging. He wants to add 12 to 15 more hours of work to his schedule but keeps hitting walls in the hiring process.
“We have to give people a chance,” he said.
Rescino graduated from Bow High School in 2020 and has been living in his own apartment in Concord since 2022. He is entirely financially independent from his family and relies on support from the state. To advance his career goals, Rescino participated in a vocational rehabilitation program called Project SEARCH.
He values structure and routine, he said. His collection of jobs helps him “to stay busy and want to learn something different each day.” He craves the variety, rather than one full-time source of employment — in fact, it’s what he needs.
Yet he estimates that it takes him about twenty or more job interviews to land a position.
“I know I dress up formally. And I show up on time with a clipboard with questions, but [them] getting back to you after the interview is not good. It’s not fair,” he said.
For most of the positions to which he applies, Rescino receives an invitation to interview. What happens next, however, has formed a familiar pattern.
“I know I shake their hand at the end, saying ‘Thank you for your time. It was nice meeting you. I look forward to hearing back from you,’” he said.
Hiring managers tell him they’ll be in touch, but then he doesn’t hear back. Only once he circles back to them does he receive a response.
“It’s not fair, because they’re saying ‘I forgot’ or hired someone else,” he said.
His mom, Nancy Rescino Bumford has seen her son get his hopes up time and again, only to be disappointed. On several occasions, he’s inquired in person about a position at an establishment with a “Now Hiring” sign out front and has been told there’s nothing available.
“The lack of training that managers and bosses have for someone on the spectrum or someone with a disability — unless you have a manager that has had somebody in their family with a disability — they don’t know. There is no training for managers for people with disabilities, but yet this population of people exists,” she said.
She sees her son as “perseverant and resilient” and said that other people in his shoes would have given up. He didn’t talk until he was five years old and underwent thousands of hours of speech and occupational therapy to get to where he is now.
Rescino believes he brings a lot to the table. He’s “motivated, dependable, reliable, thorough — and honest,” he said.
“I put effort into finding the job and wanting to work there and learn new things, get experience and skills,” he said.
Once, he applied to be a dietary aide and was given a dishwashing position instead. This is one example, but it’s a situation that has repeated itself multiple times. To him, it feels like he’s being underestimated. But more than that, it feels misleading, a bait-and-switch, like “a lie,” he said.
Rescino has experienced the same rejection over a dozen times in the past year or two.
The 25-year-old isn’t alone.
In 2017, around 2.21 % of the adult population in the U.S. was estimated to have autism, or about one in every 45 people, according to a study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list “high rates of unemployment or under-employment” as a challenge facing those on the spectrum.
For 27-year-old Christina Walker, not every work environment is a good fit. The Manchester resident spent months working at Goodwill, where she felt “overstimulated” by the customer-facing nature of her job on the sales floor and said it was like being part of an “assembly line.”
After less than a year in that role, Walker decided to seek alternative employment. But it was easier said than done.
“I tried restaurants and other places, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re sorry. Thanks to your resume, you don’t have the qualifications and stuff,'” she said. “And I’m like, ‘How is that possible when I’ve been to Pinkerton [Academy], and they give you the Work to Learn program?’ And I’m going, ‘What if this is because I’m ADHD and autistic?'”
Numerous dead ends later — including multiple applications submitted to Market Basket and Hannaford, neither of which responded to Walker — a friend told her about Corey’s Closet, a thrift store in Hooksett.
Founded in 2017 by Brenda Sliwerski, the store seeks to “create meaningful employment” for adults with developmental disabilities, one of whom is Sliwerski’s son, Corey.
“We have job coaches in place that help to train and work side by side with our individuals that come in for job opportunities,” Sliwerski said. “We like to start out typically as volunteer and see what tasks they enjoy, what ones they excel at, how we can support them.”
Walker spent five weeks volunteering before being hired to work Wednesdays and Fridays. She’s now been there for a year and described the store as “a big family.”
It’s also been a collection of “teaching moments,” she said. The store’s job coach has been instrumental in this respect.
“Sometimes we do make mistakes, like accidentally putting something in the wrong space, and she softly corrects us, and then we fix it. It’s kind of like a mother teaching her daughter to do something,” said Walker.
Mentorship has been huge for Rescino, too. He has been working at Red Arrow Diner off of Loudon Road in Concord for over three years. The company assigned him a kitchen mentor so he’d have someone to turn to for support. Not every workplace has been as accomodating — and not all of his coworkers have been as kind.
He also needs information to be written down in order to process it. A past employer even created a manual for him to refer to. Checklists, too, are key to his success.
His mom thinks there should be stronger job coaching opportunities. She said that when her son has tried to connect with a coach, he’s always been told there’s a backlog and no one’s available.
“I think disabled people also bring out the best in people,” she said. It would bring out the best in disabled employees “if job coaches [could] address questions, but bosses would just, instead of thinking about all the negatives, just try to understand that they will be better because of their experiences with him,” she said.
Sliwerski, for her part, strives to provide the exact environment that her son Corey sought when he aged out of the school system.
“I learned very quickly that there wasn’t going to be a lot of meaningful opportunities for him. He could do things that, you know, kept him busy, but as far as you know, independence and learning new skills, there just isn’t a lot,” she said.
Corey’s Closet has a perpetual waiting list of prospective employees eager to contribute to the store’s mission.
“I really believe that you know it’s a workforce that would change the view of a lot of businesses in town,” Sliwerski added.
As Rescino continues searching for a dozen more hours of employment to add to his week, he hopes to one day transition into data entry. Both he and his mom agree that his knack for details and thorough nature lend themselves well to this field.
For him, though, it all comes back to the idea of letting people show you what they’re capable of.
“It’s not just me. Give everybody a chance,” he said.
