Furyous Consulting

How To Fix Workforce Development: End Legalized Discrimination

It’s highly unlikely that someone with a high-end degree, access to transportation, a decent GPA and work history will walk into a workforce development program (although not impossible. I got my start that way.) Workforce development programs exist to teach “work readiness”; the focus is on learning rudimentary skills such as showing up on time, working well with others, dressing professionally and taking direction. While I have argued that a true Workforce Development program must go far beyond this, let’s start where we are for now.

That said, workforce development programs have a gigantic, policy-wide obstacle to successfully achieving their missions and helping the most vulnerable urban residents achieve self-sufficiency through employment: the legalized discrimination against criminals.

WHO WANTS TO HIRE A CRIMINAL?

Well, it turns out, nobody. Not when unemployment hovers around 8.1% of the US and 9.9% of Chicago. Not when every job feels like their work is too vulnerable to the violent, immoral behavior of criminals. Not when criminals are less likely to have access to transportation, less educated, and more likely to go back to jail because of recidivism- which, itself, perpetuates the cycle of criminal recidivism. There are so many not-criminals to hire, that hiring a criminal seems absurdly foolish.

However, there are very real racial and socioeconomic consequences to the failure to hire criminals. Of course, one of the requirements of a paroled convict is that they find gainful employment or face more jail time- which destroys the convict’s life and places a staggering burden on the State and on taxpayers. In addition, because of specific policy decisions made by those in the justice system, police are more likely to arrest, and prosecutors are more likely to charge, low-income African American men of color. In 2008, 1 in 3 African-American men had gone to prison; more than 1 in 10 Black men are in jail on any given day in 2012, and 60% of the prison population are not-white. This is not the result of inherent criminality of Blackness, but of racial profiling; the same behaviors exhibited by White teens would be excused without a second thought, but in Black teens would be arrested without exception. Don’t believe me? Try to say “We need to do something about white delinquency”.

Check out Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to see more of what I’m talking about- and to find out what to do about it.

How To Fix Workforce Development, Part 1: Let The Professionals Handle It

The single greatest thing that can be done to improve workforce development is to call in the reinforcements. A real recruiter with real experience placing real people in real, long term, sustainable jobs that aren’t at Wal-Mart will have insights that most workforce development programs just don’t.

It’s true that workforce development programs as they are currently structured are part social work, part transitioning people off of welfare, and part remedial education. And it’s true that if these workforce development programs were to call in a team of recruiters used to dealing with college educated professionals, and ask them to navigate things like spotty phone access, chronically breaking down cars, and social services programs, the vast majority of them will flounder. If you ask a woman who has worked in hospitality, specifically, as a maid, for twenty years, what her greatest accomplishment in her job will be, she will not be able to talk about how her work directly impacted the brand of her organization. She wouldn’t even know to talk about how much her boss loves her, how she is requested by name by a third of her clients, how one of her clients left her a $200 tip one Christmas. And recruiters that are used to talking about ROI probably won’t know how to help someone who worked at Dunkin Donuts for ten years how he’s going to get his first job in an office.

It’s important, then, to have both a recruiter and a social worker directly involved in workforce development- or, ideally, people who have both recruiting and social work experience.

The kind of individual who can help someone get their GED while also navigating childcare and poverty, and then proceed to get them their first sustainable job, is not a plug and play kind of individual. Training is important, and until workforce development programs can produce this kind of training in the few weeks available before the employee is brought to scale, it’s not a bad idea to hire someone who either already has all of the skills, or hire teams of two that can complement each other and serve their clients holistically.

The Problem with Resume Writing for Workforce Development, Part 3: There’s Often Nothing to Put In It

People don’t jump immediately into workforce development programs. Usually, they have some major hurdle they’re trying to overcome. These hurdles can be dishonorable discharges from their previous employment, long periods of unemployment for parenting, medical, or other reasons, a history of job hopping, being too young, being too old. Some participants are married women who have never had an economic need to work until the economy collapsed. Some participants have had the same job for twenty-five years, and have never performed a job search in their lives.

Unfortunately, resume writing courses do not meet these needs. The ideal resume writing student has had between two and four jobs over the course of their careers; these jobs have “stacked,” that is, each job is a promotion or a logical lateral move from the last job. The ideal resume writing student is currently employed, and looking for a promotion. The ideal resume writing student has graduated from a “good” college, with a degree that makes sense in relation to the direction their career has taken. The ideal resume writing student has very little reason to participate in a workforce development program.

Completing a compelling resume around one of these obstacles is an art. It cannot be performed in a classroom-style, data-entry-driven setting. And, unfortunately, when grant money is driven by numbers served and by generic outcomes like “found a job,” not by the quality of job the candidate eventually receives or by its relevance to their skills. Few workforce development programs have the staffing capacity or the training to hold the hand of every person they work with, creating with them the resumes that can help, say, a CPA who has taken a few years out of the work force to raise a child, or a supervisor with a decorated 30-year career but no college education. Instead, these programs place job seekers at low-skill organizations, like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or, most toxic of all, as a staff member within that workforce development organization- perpetuating this cycle of poor curriculum and staff with little clue how to actually get jobs.

The Problem with Resume Writing for Workforce Development, Part 1: The Curriculum is Awful

It seems like every workforce development curriculum features workshops on resume writing- in a unique place that is both basic curriculum and noteworthy enough to be featured on all promotional materials. Resumes get interviews, conventional wisdom says, and interviews get jobs. Unfortunately, the resume writing courses offered in workforce development curricula are often a formula of three elements: a basic template, an infamous List Of Verbs, and a course on remedial data entry as candidates delete placeholder text and fill in their own information. The result is a wholly ordinary document. When every job posting on a major jobs board results in an average of 200 submitted applications, it is not surprising that ordinary documents fail.

Good resume writing instruction does exist. Overviews are offered for free at some businesses on the internet; it can be purchased from many job boards. But the disjoint between the version offered in nonprofits and the version offered in for-profits is astronomical- contributing to the income inequality between people who receive social services and people who have $100-500 to burn on a consultant who will write their resume on their behalf.