1 Ready to Work As the economy improves, it is critical that hard-hit Americans with skills, experience, and a desire to work have the opportunity to get back to work. A complex labor market can make it difficult for individuals to find the right pathways, even if they possess needed skills. Formal education requirements for jobs and employer hiring screens based on factors other than skills for the job can make it harder for people to get jobs. Job seekers can fall through the cracks of a confusing process. At a January summit at the White House, the President called attention to the fact that the long-term unemployed risk being left behind. Since the summit, the number of long-term unemployed has declined by 500,000, accounting for more than 70 percent of the overall drop in unemployment.16 Notably, the long-term unemployment rate fell faster over the last six months than it did over the previous six months. Despite this progress, however, the long-term unemployment rate remains well above its 2001 to 2007 average: 3.1 million Americans are long-term unemployed today, making up 32.8 percent of all 17 the unemployed. Studies show that long-term unemployed job seekers are only half as likely to be considered for hiring, even though their education and experience levels match those of other job seekers. A recent study by Evolv found their job performance once hired to be equal that of other 18 hires. The White House has continued this focus, announced by the President in January. Long-Term Unemployment Playbooks Following up on the White House Best Practices for Hiring and Recruiting the Long-term Unemployed. As part of their commitment to enhance employment opportunities among American workers and address the challenges the long-term unemployed typically face in finding employment, Deloitte and the Rockefeller Foundation are working together to create playbooks that can be used by employers and long-term unemployed job seekers to return a greater number of job seekers to the workforce. The employer playbook will provide tactical tools to help employers operationalize the Best Practices and tap into the full potential of the long-term unemployed population. Many employers are already making progress in reforming their recruiting and hiring practices to help get the long term unemployed back to work. Chapter 3 highlights a few particularly promising examples of progress from Aetna, MetLife, and Frontier Communications. Demand-Driven Training Guide to Expand and Improve Regional Partnerships. Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, with support from the Aspen Institute’s Skills for America’s Future, has developed a guide about how to make reemployment and training programs more demand-driven. The guide is hosted at SCFplaybook.com. Skills for Chicagoland’s Future has used this model to hire almost 1,000 people since launching in 2012, and 70 percent of those individuals have been long- term unemployed, showing how a demand-driven model can be effective at both meeting business needs and helping disadvantaged groups. 16 Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014). 17 Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014). 18 Aki Ito, "Long-Term Unemployed Make for Just as Strong Hires: Study," Bloomberg (April 2014). 19