Denver Program helps employers find workers

Mayor’s office sets up free service offering 4 levels of assistance

By Steve Caulk, Rocky Mountain News

The Denver mayor’s office has established a program that will allow prospective employers to find workers with a minimum of effort.

Called RecruitmentPlus, the program founded by the Office of Workforce Development will help place workers through various levels of intervention.

"With the higher unemployment rate, the employers are being more selective, so helping them move forward in their hiring decisions was something we wanted to encourage and make easier," said Shepard Nevel, director of the Office of Workforce Development.

The office implemented the program Monday after a brief pilot program.

The four recruitment options, ranging in level of intervention from lowest to highest, are QuickList, Select Choice, On-Site/Direct and Industry/Geographic Job Fair.

For instance, a QuickList user (employer) will post job requirements, and then the employer makes contact with interested parties at the employer’s discretion. Under Select Choice, the office assembles a "recruitment team" to identify the most likely job candidates prior to referral to the employer. In the Industry Job Fair, the office actually sets up a fair for a single employer or group of employers, making the necessary arrangements for advertising, etc.

While Nevel expects the service to attract small businesses in particular, he said it also should appeal to larger companies in various industries. All services are free.

"We recruit retail employees in a variety of ways, through newspaper ads, through word-of-mouth, through signs in stores," said Jeff Stroh, spokesman for Safeway in Denver. "We have an employment office rep stationed at the Urban League of Denver, and we work with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Any program that can assist us in identifying qualified individuals in a retail career path, we’d be interested in looking at and working with."

The Office of Workforce Development served 1,300 workers in 2002, and Nevel said he expects the RecruitmentPlus program to increase that number "significantly."

For more information, go to http://www.mowd.org.

http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_1703695,00.html