Paul Bass Photo
McGill packs up after a New Haven Works Westville road show.
New Haven’s emerging “jobs pipeline” came to Patricia McGill’s neighborhood — and promised finally to get her through Yale’s door.
The occasion was a presentation at Edgewood School by Mary Reynolds, the director hired by local powerbrokers to run a new outfit called New Haven Works, charged with finding 1,000 local people jobs with local employers over the next four years.
The agency hasn’t officially opened its doors yet. It has been setting up shop in Yale-donated space on Whitney Avenue while quietly negotiating “binding agreements” with major employers to interview and give a special shot to out-of-work or underemployed New Haven job-seekers. It has also taken its strategy out for a test-drive — and landed some people jobs at Yale.
Reynolds imparted this information to 20 Westvillers who attended the meeting, organized by the 25th Ward Democratic Committee.
She also answered questions from unemployed mid-career job-seekers like McGill.
An injury on the job left McGill, who’s now 56, out of work for years, she said. She previously held jobs in maintenance, credit collection, and cleaning. She has since obtained a college degree in American history and looked high and low for a new job
“I’ve put in 50 applications in between Yale University and Yale Hospital,” McGill said. She said she has called at least that many times without receiving a response.
Reynolds responded that New Haven Works is gearing up to help people specifically in her situation. The agency — formed by local business, government, and labor leaders after a slate of labor-backed candidates won election to the Board of Aldermen on a job-creation platform — will pre-screen unemployed and underemployed New Haveners to determine whether they’re ready for job interviews or need some help first. It will send people who need it to training or counseling programs or help putting together resumes, then follow up with them. It will eventually send job-ready people to interviews with major employers. It is meanwhile negotiating with Yale, Yale-New Haven Hospital, United Illuminating, the gas company, the water authority, and other top employers to guarantee that New Haven Works job-seekers will get interviews and, in many cases, have spots reserved for some of them.
New Haven has an estimated 13,000 unemployed and underemployed adults. New Haven anticipates having over 22,000 new jobs open up thanks to new development projects (including Gateway Community College and Downtown Crossing) and the booming medical-related sector. Some existing employers say they have openings but have trouble find city people ready to fill the jobs.
In recent weeks, New Haven Works conducted a trial run. It sent 30 screened job-seekers to Yale on Feb. 28, and another 30 this week.
The trial run went great, according to Diane Turner, Yale’s director of community hiring initiatives and the university’s point person for the pipeline.
“They screened them. They prepped them. They made sure they had completed applications and resumes,” Turner said. Yale’s human resources department interviewed everyone in both batches of job-seekers, then lined up follow-up interviews with Yale recruiters. Six applicants from the Feb. 28 trial run have already received offers for positions in security, food service, and library work, Turner said; other applications are in “various stages” of getting there.
“Things are moving,” she said.
Turner said under the binding agreement with New Haven Works, Yale will give first priority for unionized job openings to laid-off Yale employees, second priority to other internal candidates, third priority to New Haveners sent by New Haven Works, and fourth priority to everyone else.
Reynolds invoked those binding agreements at Monday night’s meeting when another job-seeker spoke of having tried to land a position through a different job-training and placement agency in town. It never found her a single interview, she reported.
Those other agencies “don’t have the influence with the employers” that New Haven Works does, Reynolds responded. “They don’t have the binding agreements. … Without that, you [just] have one guy calling one guy. This is funded by the employers.” Reynolds noted that the New Haven Works board of directors includes execs from Yale, the hospital, UI, and the Chamber of Commerce.
Also, unlike some similar other agencies, New Haven Works focuses just on New Haveners, not on suburbanites.
Reynolds, right, with New Haven Works volunteer Cheryl Bergman at Monday night’s presentation.
“How many people here have applied to Yale?” Reynolds asked the Edgewood School gathering. Four hands went up.
“How many have applied more than five times?” she continued. The same four hands went up.
“How many have heard something back?”
No hands went up this time.
That’s what will change, she vowed.
New Haven Works will open for real some time in the spring, Reynolds said. In the meantime she gave the crowd in Westville the agency’s website address and .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Patricia McGill took down the email address. She planned to send in her resume that evening — and then prepare for that long-awaited interview.
Click here for a queue of previous Independent stories on the emerging jobs pipeline.
"Six applicants from the Feb. 28 trial run have already received offers."
One year, six applicants. In the meantime, dozens if not hundreds of Yale/YNHH/UI employees who lived in New Haven as of last year have moved out to the suburbs, as they tend to do every year.
This program is a fun idea, but will have no meaningful impact on the local unemployment problem. Surely, the founders will take credit for those six employees causing a reduction in the unemployment rate (if that happens, regionally) - but if they are serious about wanting to address the problem of unemployment in places like Newhallville, they need to advocate for a different approach.
Transportation, not job training, is far and away the largest barrier to securing employment in our state.
By the way, how many of those six employees will even still be living in New Haven two or three years from now?