When Larry Benders started as head of Cleveland's federally funded jobs office in mid-2008, helping people find work usually meant paying for job training.
Larry Benders: You look at a piece of data, labor market data from the federal government, and it says you are going to need 50, you know, advanced welders. So you go out and train 50 people in advanced welding, that was kind of the way it used to work. But when we started looking at our outcomes we realized that that was delivering trained welders, but not trained employed welders.
Those workers would then brush up their resumes and pretty much hope that work appeared. Last year, Benders decided his office, Employment Connection, was approaching the problem backwards: instead of focusing on the jobless, they needed to be zeroing in on the people doing the hiring.
Larry Benders: We said, wait a minute, let's go and talk to the employers and say how many welders do you need? And what sort of welders do you need? And what does a successful welder in your organization look like? Then take that information back and then try to do matches for welders in our system that fit the profile of the specific employer.
But soon after taking over the office, Benders' budget was slashed by 40 percent and he had to lay off half his staff. Benders, who had worked at companies like Ben and Jerry's and Johnson and Johnson, did hire a marketing team. They cold called 3,000 companies to find jobs. It paid off. Over the last six months, Cleveland's jobs office helped nearly 1,500 people get jobs at an average wage of $11.56 an hour. The year before, it took twice the staff twice as long to get about the same number of people hired.
Job recruiter: OK, how many years of engineering-related work experience do you have?
Alfred Schiazza: I have 33.
55-year-old Alfred Schiazza is going over his resume with a recruiter in a spartan office in a western Cleveland suburb. Behind him, nearly 50 out of work engineers in suits sit waiting their turn. The system works like this: companies tell Employment Connection what they're looking for, recruiters screen candidates, and the best are forwarded on for more interviews and hopefully, a job offer.
Recruiter: Can you tell me what kind of projects that was with?
Alfred Schiazza: Uh, Pentair. We made waste water pumps and Moen. Moen, I've designed a number of different faucets...
The Cleveland jobs office does pay for training, but only when there's a job waiting. Steven Kowalski, CEO of a local manufacturer, hired four people through the agency even though they were missing specific skills he needed.
Steven Kowalski: I personally think it's a wonderful use of our tax dollars because you get tangible results. People actually get employed which as far as we're concerned that should be the ultimate goal.
Now, this strategy might sound like common sense, but Cleveland is the only one of Ohio's 20 federally-funded workforce areas to put placement over training. Rutgers University professor Carl Van Horn says when the federal law that authorized states to open these jobs offices passed in 1998, the economy was booming. The law aimed to help retrain workers with out of date skills. Fast forward to 2011 when plenty of people can't find work even though their resumes are impressive.
Carl Van Horn: The challenge in this economy is very different than it was when this law was passed, so there is a bit of a mismatch between the policy structure that we have at the federal level and the realities of the economy that we face today.
Van Horn and others say many of the country's nearly 600 federally-funded workforce areas emphasize training, but no one really knows how unusual Cleveland's strategy is. Chris King, a University of Texas labor economist, says focusing on hiring is smart, but difficult.
Chris King: If you make a really good match between a progressive employer that's going to help train those people once they get on the job, that's going to have much better results. If you simply make a match in a firm that's busy turning people over right and left that's really not going to do much for anybody.
Cleveland's Employment Connection is set to double the number of people it helps get jobs this year. And they'll do that not by just offering them retraining but by finding jobs for the workers that come to them for help.