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Dashboard

Published July 2007

Recruiting Through the Publicly Funded Workforce System

  C. Michael Ferraro

In the competitive global marketplace, those responsible for recruiting and retaining employees are using any advantage to help their organizations win the war for talent. They also are getting more and more frustrated with traditional talent recruitment means because many of those sources are not very fruitful in today's environment.

Retaining employees is part of that challenge, and keeping employees skilled and ensuring they perform at a high level goes a long way toward retention efforts.

Since it was developed, workforce executives increasingly have been using the publicly funded workforce system, as my personal experience can attest. The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 was designed to coordinate most, if not all, of the federally funded workforce training programs.

One of the major aspects of the legislation was to create the nation's one-stop career center systems. State and local workforce investment boards, which are business-led, are responsible for setting up policies that affect the operations of the states' one-stop career center systems. One of their major goals is to help businesses find and retain workers. These systems are similar to other public career centers, although their goal is to be more business-focused.

How can talent managers access these centers and get them to help solve some of their talent issues?

In the beginning, when I was the chairman of the Washington D.C.-based Metro Tech IT Training program, I was skeptical about how a $20 million publicly funded training program could be managed through three states' one-stop centers and satisfy the needs of businesses. Most public training program funds are allocated and spent with really no business involvement until the participants are trained.

So, the Metro Tech board (along with the Department of Labor) decided to change the standard model for funding workforce programs. We decided we needed to get the employers more involved in the beginning of the recruiting and training process.

To do that, we determined the one-stop career centers would have unemployed workers who were eligible for the program first meet with possible employers. If the employers felt a candidate would fit into their organization, then the project would invest in training.

I felt the best part of the program was not only that the future employers had the opportunity to choose their candidates for the program but that they had the ability to select the training provider.

This was big, as employers usually feel more comfortable with a training provider that will satisfy their needs. They also became more comfortable using the one-stop career system, and those relationships continue today.

The results for this program were outstanding. We trained more than 3,000 and employed many more who didn't need the training. Businesses were excited to participate and are still very much engaged in their local centers.

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