Autumn 2007 Activity: New REACH Center Helps Solve Hiring Dilemma

How do you connect qualified workers with employers who are seeking them? For workforce officials in Indiana, the answer was the creation of a one-stop integrated resource facility designed to help businesses find and hire quality employees in high-pay, high-skill career fields.

The Toyota expansion at Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. (SIA) in Lafayette provided the impetus for the creation of the Regional Employment Assessment Center for Hiring (REACH). The brainchild of Deborah Waymire, chief operations officer, Tecumseh Area Partnership (TAP) in Lafayette, the center is a pilot project of the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative funded by Purdue University.

“We faced a dilemma: How were we going to help SIA find the 1,000 skilled workers they needed for their Toyota expansion and backfill the openings left at other companies when their employees got jobs with SIA?” said Waymire. “The solution was the REACH Center.”

Workforce officials established this center to foster regional business attraction, expansion, and retention, according to Waymire. It is the only such facility in the state; officials plan to replicate it in Kokomo in 2008 and eventually in other counties as well.

The center has moved beyond a collection of profiles and assessments to building a consortium of businesses for faster (just-in-time) access to qualified job seekers ready for hire, she said. Employers use the center as a ready source of potential employees whose skills have been documented through the WorkKeys pre-employment assessment process.

— Deborah Waymire, Chief Operations Officer, Tecumseh Area Partnership

WorkKeys-profiled companies and small businesses are the main customers of the center, which promotes the values of being part of the WorkKeys employer community and of raising the skill levels of the workforce, said Chris Waymire, senior vice president of capacity building and organizational development for TAP.

In addition to helping employers find quality workers, the center informs prospects about area employers, the types of positions they offer, and the skill levels needed for them. Prospects can obtain this information from company showcases in the lobby of the center. Several of the 25–30 area WorkKeys companies are featured each day through company literature, samples of products, types of jobs available, and profile results detailing skill levels needed for success within the company.

The center maintains a database of all WorkKeys-profiled companies and assessments in order to provide objective criteria of the workforce for both business attraction and retention. In addition, it maintains a regional database that currently includes results for approximately 9,600 people who have taken the WorkKeys assessments.

This extensive database is essential for Lafayette, which offers more jobs per capita than any other U.S. city, according to CareerBuilders.com. The database helps TAP show companies considering locating facilities in the region that there is a qualified applicant pool from which to draw employees.

The center, which serves a 14-county area in north central Indiana, provides a variety of services to area employers and job prospects, including customized worker recruitment, employment verification, employee background and reference checking, drug testing, and intensive interview training.