A push to hire the long-term unemployed
People who’ve been out of work for months often face an uphill battle getting hired. That’s why some 300 companies signed a White House pledge earlier this year to reduce hiring barriers for the three million job seekers who’ve been out of work 27 weeks or longer.
One company’s approach: Forget resumes; turn to videos.
Frontier Communications Corp. sells things like high speed internet and phone service. The company realized that resumes can’t always predict who’ll be good at selling its triple play packages. Jim Oddo was looking for soft skills.
“Like the ability to delight the customer,” says Oddo, senior vice president of human resources. “How do you read that on a resume?”
So this year, Frontier has been moving from a resume-first hiring model to a video-first model. To do so, the company teamed up with a group called HireVue. As the system rolled out, applicants started answering a few questions on videos they could submit from their smartphones.
“So the very first evaluation that we would have of someone is how they communicated,” Oddo says. “And then we would look at their resume.”
Frontier’s needs dovetailed with the Obama Administration’s push to decrease employment barriers for the long-term unemployed. Oddo says Frontier hired more unemployed people this year, half of whom were long-term unemployed.
The White House is touting this strategy and others.
Mitchell Hirsch with the National Employment Law Project says otherwise qualified jobless applicants are sometimes rejected by automatic filters.
“So they’re being unfairly screened out,” he says. “Often without the direct knowledge of the hiring managers themselves.”
A new guide to hiring the long-term unemployed recommends removing those filters.
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