Screening In Talent vs Screening Out

How workforce partnerships can better reach America’s talent at scale

For too long, reskilling has been relegated to corner offices and reserved for those with VP and above titles. In fact, over 80 percent of employers’ reskilling dollars are spent on retaining mid- to late-career employees — rather than lifting up those in low-wage roles who most need pathways that offer stability and growth. Moreover, reskilling is often a slow process — screening in handfuls of workers rather than working with hundreds or even thousands at a time.

The Future of Work Grand Challenge was created to change this aspect of reskilling. Our driving goal is ambitious: we’re working to rapidly reskill 25,000 Americans and place them into higher-wage and higher-growth careers. But we can’t accomplish this with new training technology alone. We need community leaders and employers working together to understand how to most effectively reach and retrain workers experiencing low wages.

Across the country, six states were selected for the Grand Challenge pilot to test new reskilling technologies that quickly and flexibly teach Americans career-based skills from home. One of these regions is in Massachusetts, where we’re reaching workers in over 40 communities.

In Massachusetts, the HireMee team (one of the finalists in the Future of Work Grand Challenge), is testing an AI-powered reskilling technology that is inherently skills-based rather than access-based. Instead of looking at a potential employee’s educational attainment, the software examines the skills they possess through the lens of what an employer is actually looking for.

Through the Grand Challenge pilot, HireMee is specifically focused on the healthcare sector, working alongside regional partners Boston Medical Center and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, a minority-serving technical college based in Boston. Their partnership, which we recently explored in a main stage panel during the 2021 Black is Tech virtual conference, is an exemplar of how workforce partners can work together to screen in — rather than screen out — potential candidates:

Bringing employers to the table