Responsible Data Use Playbook for Job Seeker Tools

Introduction

Public and private agencies of all kinds have long attempted to develop useful job seeker tools. The massive unemployment crisis caused by COVID-19 highlights the urgent need for a more synchronized response from the philanthropic, private, and public sectors to enhance job seekers’ experiences and ultimately bridge the gap between available talent and workforce demand. Now more than ever, job seekers need a collaborative approach grounded in the lived experiences of the people struggling in the labor market today. We need to put their needs front and center and provide them more relevant, actionable information and support.

Newly laid-off workers do not have the technologies and tools they need to analyze their talents, highlight their expertise, and assess their skill gaps. They need information about how to choose the right career pathways for their goals and how to develop the skills needed to begin or continue their progress along those pathways. Job seekers want guidance on which pathways will be most effective, affordable, and targeted to help them grow and thrive in the labor market. They also need wraparound support services to help make sense of the sheer volume of available resources and make the best decisions possible.

The Responsible Data Use Playbook for Job Seeker Tools is intended to provide private sector actors, state and local governments, and the philanthropic community with guidelines to develop the most effective job seeker tools for newly laid-off workers. At the core of these tools is a commitment to data sharing and data governance, which are critical to providing job seekers with access to accurate information on labor markets and training opportunities. These plays serve as a framework for how to design initiatives and tools for workers, how to identify organizations critical to the implementation of this design, and how to create sustainable governance of those tools and resources. This is how we begin to build stronger engines of social and economic mobility.

In this playbook, you will find four guiding principles and seven plays—each illuminated through real-life examples. We hope that over time, the community will continue to offer suggestions for other useful examples of progress.

Guiding Principles

This playbook was developed using four guiding principles to ground the overall vision and each of the plays.

Job seeker experience and needs should be the focus, and should include support, guidance, and advising in addition to digital tools and resources.
Equity, and eliminating equity gaps, should be a central goal.
Cross-sector collaborations can produce the most effective results.
Tools should be built with longevity and sustainability in mind.

Guiding Use Cases

The highest priority use cases for jobseeker tools at this time revolve around:

Mapping out all the job opportunities and credentialing programs in a region
Measuring the market value of the available credentialing programs and in-demand skills
Aligning on pathways to opportunity that fill local needs and meet the job seekers where they are
Recommending specific pathways to individuals given the skills and credentials they’ve got and their goals, and
Coordinating on wraparound supports among service providers (e.g. health, housing, childcare) to ensure the pathway is accessible and feasible for those most in need.

Examples of States at Work

As state and local governments, non-profit organizations, private vendors, and philanthropic organizations seek to provide the best information and resources for job seekers, here are a few approaches that exhibit best practices.

Arizona

ARIZONA@WORK is a collaborative effort of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Arizona Commerce Authority, Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity, and local workforce areas. It provides job seekers with a suite of tools, including a resume builder, targeted job search functions, and information about market trends. The tool highlights high-demand occupations to address the current labor market needs in the state, and the user interface is attractive and intuitive. The portal, which is itself an innovative solution for job seekers, is also supported by a statewide outreach effort, and the preliminary data suggest that outreach has been successful.

Colorado

Part of the Data for American Dream initiative, My Colorado Journey is powered by a new, multi-agency, public-private data trust that, over time, will both unite the existing fragmented ecosystem of data in Colorado and allow for the creation of new datasets that connect services, programs, and education and employment opportunities. Similarly, the My Colorado Journey platform takes a fragmented set of end-user experiences across agencies and provides a unified and personalized user interface platform, rooted in a strong partnership between multiple state government agencies, private vendors, and local philanthropy. By involving partners from a variety of sectors, Colorado ensured both that the needs of many user types are represented in the design of the initiative, and that users from each of these types are recruited to both test and utilize the tool.

New Jersey

In New Jersey, the current job seeker solution is a trio of tools. New Jersey was one of the first states to stand up a rapid response effort to help those laid off as a result of COVID-19 days within the declaration of the public health emergency. The pre-COVID-19 job seeker solution is the New Jersey Career Network, a digital coaching tool that helps people navigate their job search. Finally, there is a more targeted approach for low-income, lower skilled, and under- and unemployed individuals being developed as part of the Data for the American Dream initiative. The New Jersey Career Network and Data for the American Dream initiatives are led by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development; the COVID-19 rapid response effort was led by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority in consultation with Labor. The Governor’s Innovation Office is the digital lead on all three of these tools.This approach will help the state ensure that it meets the demands of different audiences of job seekers in the state.

Take the Next Step

Suggest a play to add to this playbook or suggest edits by sending us a message.
Discuss this playbook and share learnings with others using the playbook in our Brighthive Responsible Data Sharing Slack Community.
Connect with a Brighthive team member to learn how Brighthive can help you solve a responsible data sharing challenge.

Acknowledgements

Brighthive owes its gratitude to co-authors Alli Bell (Three Arrows Up Consulting), Michelle R. Weise (Imaginable Futures), and expert contributors Patrick Lane (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, WICHE), Kelle Parsons (American Institutes for Research), and Brian Prescott, (National Center For Higher Education Management Systems, NCHEMS), for the creation of this playbook.

Brighthive would like to thank team members Maithri Vangala, Danielle Saunders, Matt Stevens, Hana Passen, Kelly Dolan, Natalie Evans Harris, and Matt Gee for their expertise and contributions to the development of this playbook.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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PLAY 1

Build and Align a Diverse Coalition

Job seekers look to numerous resources and supports as they consider their options, but sifting through the volume of available information can be overwhelming. Developing and aligning a coalition will make sure that everyone is singing from the same song sheet. The most effective way to provide positive outcomes for job seekers is to unite organizations in a coalition with common goals that include: developing and promoting job seeker tools and resources; ensuring job seekers have adequate support to help them navigate and interpret the tools; developing accountability measures and metrics; and sharing and using data.

Job seekers operate in noisy environments – with many options and opinions – and it is difficult to know which resources should be trusted and which are the most effective.

A coalition involving a wide array of agencies, organizations, and voices will help ensure the inclusion of necessary voices, relevant data, and outreach. By inviting multiple stakeholders, coalitions will be able to facilitate discussions about job seeker needs, how to promote equitable and successful outcomes, and the potential impact on society. The collaboration will be more representative of the experience of the job seeker who must successfully interact with multiple agencies, interfaces, organizations, barriers, and the situations that arise from the combined interactions. These discussions will include job seekers’ and potential intermediaries’ input and needs, to ultimately ensure stakeholder buy-in.

The key to any successful, sustainable collaboration among multiple organizations is a clearly defined and documented shared goal or priority, especially when collaborators must share sensitive data to achieve that goal or priority. Collaborators can identify the crucial data and information that job seekers need by identifying a common user of the data and resources.

Checklist

Determine a common goal or extremely short list of goals to focus on, while leaving the longer list for next steps. Taking on too much at once can muddle and overextend resources.
Determine which organizations have relevant data, services, and capacity to shape and contribute to the common goal, especially those who have specific resources to reach and serve communities of color, rural populations, etc.
Start by establishing partnerships with the most targeted group necessary to accomplish the goals of the coalition - you can grow the coalition over time.
While the coalition should start small, consult widely - include all relevant stakeholders and partners, especially voices that can speak to the experiences of vulnerable job seekers.
Include job seekers, or a representative of job seekers, as a critical part of the coalition.
Bring in employers as an important partner throughout the process, including working with them to reduce bias in the job posting and hiring process.
Develop cross-sector relationships with a personal touch – reach out and meet with people, develop a shared understanding of the challenge and potential solutions.
Evaluate current partnerships to determine whether there are existing resources to deploy in service of the goal.
Identify the needs of job seekers and employers, equity gaps that need to be filled, and economic opportunities that will be addressed.
Make equity an explicit part of the conversation, especially around how data and support services can be used to both identify and rectify issues of historic and structural inequity.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What other public agencies should be included?
What kinds of private organizations should be involved?
How can those agencies and organizations be involved?
What do those agencies and organizations add? How can they help increase capacity?
How does each organization help address equity gaps?

Private Sector

What can you provide beyond what exists?
How can you augment existing efforts? What kind of agencies should be involved?
What outreach is most effective to form the appropriate relationships between organizations?
How can you develop sustainable, cross-sector relationships?

Philanthropy

Are there collaborations already serving the proposed population/geography?
If there are existing collaborations, can those be leveraged or brought into the proposed project?
Are the partnerships deep and sustainable?

Resources and Examples

National Skills Coalition, State Initiatives and Academies: Information about and examples of state coalitions for workforce development.
WorkSourceWA: WorkSource is a statewide partnership of state, local and nonprofit agencies that provides an array of employment and training services to job seekers and employers in Washington. Customers access services electronically through WorkSourceWA.com or through a network of more than 60 WorkSource centers, affiliates and connection sites.

PLAY 2

Design for the Job Seeker

Job seekers need tools that are easy to access, navigate, and understand, and that provide them with the resources, information, and connections they need to find a job, leverage their experience and skills, and access support. The most effective job seeker tools will provide individuals (or intermediaries) with the information they need on a variety of platforms.

All too often, job seeker tools are difficult to access or navigate, only address a single worker need, or do not provide adequate information for users to make well-informed decisions. In the worst cases, the information provided is biased, inaccurate, inaccessible, or incomprehensible. When designing these tools and resources, take special care to ensure that they are offered through various modalities (particularly in communities where internet access is limited) and are easy to understand. These tools must help job seekers communicate their qualifications and must inform them about other helpful support services and resources.

Checklist

Determine the end user (including intermediaries).
Content is critical: develop wording, information, and outputs that are relevant to those users. It may be necessary to develop multiple versions of the same tool for specific audiences.
Consider engaging an external user interface designer.
Establish a quality assurance process and criteria to assess the information provided to job seekers, in order to determine whether the stated goals of the tool are being accomplished.
Plan for evaluation and continuous development, including incorporating stakeholder feedback.
Provide versions in different languages as appropriate.
Develop tools to be accessed across a variety of platforms (mobile, desktop, phone, printouts, brochures, etc.).
Guide users in translating their qualifications and skills into a record of their experience for potential employers.
Evaluate design principles and criteria for equity.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What are the specific needs of the vulnerable workers?
What are the demographics and geography that affect how individuals will interact and use the tools?

Private Sector

What are the best practices for design?
How can you contribute to the design process and share your findings with the community?

Philanthropy

What lessons about design for different audiences can be shared to make the most effective tools?
How can your investment facilitate an open applications marketplace that enables multiple applications to run using shared data?
How can your impact metrics encourage understanding of and accountability to job seeker needs?

Resources and Examples

Brighthive tip on designing for the user: to engage in a thoughtful and iterative user-testing process throughout development, test the wording and design with a representative sample of the intended diverse audience. Start early in the process by testing wireframes and mockups (static or interactive visuals of the tool before it is built), then a prototype (a representation of the tool’s functionality that should cost a very small fraction of the cost of producing your planned tool). This allows critical changes to be made early at low expense and hone in on user experience.
Data for the American Dream, Communicating with Vulnerable Workers: This report synthesizes existing research about how to communicate effectively with low-wage, unemployed, and underemployed workers.
Data for the American Dream, Ten Strategies for Reaching Workers: The top 10 strategies for effective communication and impact with vulnerable workers.
Data for the American Dream, Addressing the Needs of Vulnerable Workers and Workforce Development Systems: A quick-reference with workers’ needs, traditional supports, existing barriers, and solutions.
Digital.gov Guides and Resources: A compendium of useful practices in accessibility, agile, UX, plain language, open data, product management, and more.

PLAY 3

Make It Relevant

Job seekers require current information tailored to their specific needs. They need to know the precise skills to acquire to get better jobs in their local labor market. All of this depends on quality labor market information curated in a way that makes it relevant, accessible, and understandable. Job seekers need to know which opportunities are priorities and which pathways will pay off meaningfully both in the short and long term.

The demand for workers is unique to a specific geographic area. Tools need to leverage the most current labor market information to ensure that the information provided by the tool both serves the worker and helps the local economy. Stakeholders must therefore set up data sharing initiatives in a way that compiles up-to-date and accurate information about the training programs and jobs that are available, maps them to the relevant skills, and enables this data to be recompiled on a regular basis to generate data resources that reflect rapid and local changes in the economy. The utilization of cross-sector experts is critical in making sure this work is done correctly and reflects on-the-ground realities, as well as immediate needs or opportunities in a region. The need for this data already existed, but the economic impacts of COVID-19 has introduced the need for new design considerations that ensure this data is calculated often, accurate within localities, and sustainable so that this data continues to be generated without creating a heavy lift on data providers.

Checklist

Determine specific regional and local needs using the most current, reliable labor market information.
Include newly emerging jobs as well as jobs in both long-standing sectors (for example, not focusing tools solely on COVID-19 related jobs presently).
Provide information on the specific skills needed to obtain and be successful in these jobs.
Utilize emerging technologies to customize data and information for individual job seekers’ needs, goals, capacities, interests, and skills.
Ensure all information provided to job seekers is accurate, timely, locally relevant, and ideally, engaging.
Keep up to date on research and initiatives at the cutting edge of workforce development, focusing on trends in directions that may be enabled by current decisions.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What labor market demand data are available and usable?
Can you utilize unemployment insurance claims data and jobs data to understand the ebb and flow of local labor market trends?
Where are labor market information and unemployment data currently stored, and how accessible is that data? Are there data sharing agreements in place to enable access or are aggregate data and labor market information trends made publicly available?
Does the information help to address specific regional needs?
How often are the data updated? Can you take steps to make it easier for training providers to update information about their training programs in a single location and have this data populate multiple third party applications?
How do you ensure data quality?

Private Sector

What real-time and relevant data can you contribute to the effort?
What unique viewpoints do you bring to the conversation?
How can your experience speak to strategies for ensuring that these tools present the most relevant, useful information to job seekers?

Philanthropy

How is real-time data helping to achieve the objectives of the initiative?
What resources can you leverage to help incorporate the most useful labor market data?
How have you seen skills successfully incorporated into such efforts? What connections can you help provide to other initiatives or grantees doing similar work?

Resources and Examples

Brighthive tip on keeping information updated: Colorado made it easier for training providers to update information about their training programs in a single location. They decided to consider the Eligible Training Providers List (ETPL) as the “canonical source of truth for training in Colorado.” This required that the ETPL be adjusted to accommodate information from a variety of training providers and even apprenticeships. This decision reduced the burden on data providers and continues to ensure that accurate and consistent information is available to the public.
United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Job Data Exchange: An open-data tool under development, the Job Data Exchange (JDX) is the vehicle employers need to move in a scalable, sustainable way towards competency-based hiring. The JDX, and the data standard it employs, will help employers and their HR partners break down a job description into specific skill and hiring requirements. This granularity can improve signalling between employers and jobseekers about the core needs of posted positions with less reliance on proxies like years of experience, could improve filtering functionality on job boards, and enable richer labor market analysis to improve the responsiveness of all stakeholders to change.
Emsi COVID-19 Resources: Emsi provides free resources such as a job-posting-sourced skills list, personalized learning and work recommendations powered by skills data, a resume optimizer, a national and a Canadian job posting dashboard, and reports.
U.S. Department of Labor, O’NET Online: The O*NET Program is the nation’s primary source of occupational information. Valid data are essential to understanding the rapidly changing nature of work and how it impacts the workforce and U.S. economy. From this information, applications are developed to facilitate the development and maintenance of a skilled workforce.
United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Talent Pipeline Management: Talent Pipeline Management® (TPM) practices are being applied to skills gap challenges to help employers build scalable, sustainable pipelines of talent. TPM is a workforce development strategy that applies supply chain management principles to talent. TPM builds the capacity of the business community to better manage career pathways so that students and workers have better employment opportunities.
McKinsey, Closing the skills gap: Five principles for serving jobseekers: Define geographic assets and identify target professions, Deliver ROI to employers and workers, Support comprehensive, demand-driven training methods, Assess and prepare learners before they start training, Coordinate the workforce-development process centrally.

PLAY 4

Solidify Data Use, Sharing, and Governance

Job seekers need comprehensive, reliable data they can trust. Strong data-sharing agreements ensure that the information passed on to job seekers and other audiences is accurate. Moreover, these agreements can take complex data and relationships and distill them into salient, easily understandable information.

The kinds of data needed to provide accurate, timely, and comprehensive information for the most effective job seeker tools come from a variety of sources. This includes information about available jobs, current and future economic demand, wage and earnings data, the kinds of skills necessary to fill labor market demands, training providers, and information about related support services. Members of the coalition or data collaborative are responsible for making sure that these data are connected and that a governance structure protects the data while ensuring its usefulness. Ideally, the governance body includes members from a number of stakeholder groups, including job seekers and employers.

In considering the types of data to be included in the agreements, remember to include those data that will help with continuous improvement and accountability assessment of the tool and job seeker experience.

Checklist

Create a governance structure that is sustainable and specific enough to satisfy members’ needs but flexible enough to both respond to new needs quickly and evolve over time, as opposed to fragile agreements that require lengthy legal review to update and become clunkier with revision.
Ensure shared ownership of the data collaborative or trust.
Make provisions that protect each member’s ability to control the data they contribute.
Identify someone who specifically represents job seekers within the data governance process, and include this job seeker or relevant representative in the conversations and decision-making around data
Create a diverse governance body that ensures that all stakeholders’ perspectives are heard.
Identify data that will help job seekers directly, as well as those data that will aid in tool design and continuous improvement for inclusion in these agreements.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What data can be shared or made available?
What are the perceived vs. actual barriers to sharing data?
What data can be provided through a vendor?
How will personal data be protected?

Private Sector

How have you ensured the protection of personal data? What are your data practices and protocols for safeguarding individual-level data?
What is your track record on data use and privacy? How can you be transparent about data use?
How can you seize the opportunity to securely derive public benefit from your data?

Philanthropy

Are there collaborations already serving the proposed population/geography?
If there are existing collaborations, can those be leveraged or brought into the proposed project?
Are the partnerships deep and sustainable?

Resources and Examples

Brighthive tip on sharing available information: Start with data that is already being shared between agencies for a specific purpose. How can this data be of additional value to job seekers? For instance, if data is already being shared between two agencies for the purposes of WIOA reporting, how can this data sharing be amended to include additional measures of ROI that would help job seekers make informed decisions about their training decisions.
Georgetown Beeck Center, Sharing Data for Social Impact: This guidebook provides information for establishing data sharing governance.
Brighthive tip on being a steward of public data: Stewardship of the public’s data has historically been viewed solely through the lens of ensuring that it is not misused. States have begun including guidance that broadens this view to include a responsibility to ensure that any data being stored by the state is also creating value for public good.
National Skills Coalition, Making the Most of Workforce Data: This webpage provides examples of state collaborations in using data.
Brighthive tip on how to use vendor data: While many vendors have done the hard work of aggregating and normalizing data sets, oftentimes your agencies already have the best data to reflect the labor market trends in your region. To ensure that vendor data represents your locality, consider analyzing it against data from your system before simply pushing vendor data to job seekers. The best solutions will integrate vendor and local data through the local lens.
Data for the American Dream, Data Sharing Agreements: This report explores important considerations for entering and maintaining strong data sharing partnerships.
Data Quality Campaign, The Art of the Possible: This report provides lessons learned from data sharing activities in Kentucky, Maryland, and Washington. “High-quality data governance, a body or process designed to make decisions about how state education data is linked, used, accessed, and protected, is key to establishing a culture of effective data use in states.”
WorkForceGPS’s All Data Big and Small: This report describes how investments in data are helping to improve human capital development policy and practice.

PLAY 5

Integrate Wraparound Support Services

If you build it, they may not come. Job seekers need more than a tool that gives them options for skills training and job openings; they need career navigation, advising, and wraparound support services, including more direct connections to employers.

It is not enough to simply develop the tool and make it available. Instead, build a careful outreach plan both during development and implementation. Job seekers often have questions like: What will this skill or credential buy me in the job marketplace? What’s the deeper value of this learning to me—now and in the future? How long will this take and how much will it cost? How do others who follow this path fare, and where can I expect to land if I give this a shot? Who can help me and where can I find that help? Is this a family-sustaining job? Where can I find childcare and transportation?

Checklist

Identify both digital and non-digital avenues through which job seekers may access the information in the tool and related support services.
Determine effective dissemination and marketing opportunities, and consider consulting a UX designer.
Develop relationships with intermediaries, if they are not part of the original coalition, and equip them with guides or other collateral that help them leverage the tools with their clients. Make sure to solicit and respond to their feedback.
Listen to users (whether job seekers or intermediaries) on the most effective strategies for disseminating information, and which information is most useful.
Test the tool functionality and job seeking process with a representative sample of diverse end users, including job seekers, to get a sense of the end-to-end experience using the tool.
Promote equity by providing wraparound support services for vulnerable and at-risk populations, including those who do not have access to an online platform or are not able to use one.
Engage employers to ensure more direct connections with job seekers and remove bias from hiring practices.
Work with employers to ensure that hiring practices value skills and experience over degree attainment.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What public resources and programs can be leveraged to help job seekers?
What kinds of educational benefits can incentivize job seekers to pursue training opportunities while still providing for their families?
How can we reduce stigma associated with utilizing those supports?

Private Sector

How can machine learning and other automated strategies help to maximize the impact of the tools? How can these strategies be evaluated for discriminatory bias?
What can you contribute to impact strategies?
How can employers evaluate and build upon their role in ensuring that opportunities are equitable?

Philanthropy

What are the most effective methods for quickly reaching vulnerable populations you have seen in practice?
How can your resources and supports be maximized to aid in the efforts to impact the identified population?
How can you incentivize wrap-around support providers and workforce intermediaries to partner more directly and engage in better data sharing?

Resources and Examples

US Digital Services Playbook: This playbook outlines best practices across sectors so that the government can build effective digital services that are responsive to the needs of the people utilizing these services.
Data for the American Dream, Communicating with Vulnerable Workers: This report synthesizes existing research about how to communicate effectively with low-income, lower-skilled, unemployed, and underemployed workers.
Data for the American Dream, Ten Strategies for Reaching Workers: The top 10 strategies for effective communication and impact with vulnerable workers.
Data for the American Dream, Addressing the Needs of Vulnerable Workers and Workforce Development Systems: A quick-reference with workers’ needs, traditional supports, existing barriers, and solutions.

PLAY 6

Be Accountable

Develop robust, reliable, and transparent methods for measuring and reporting the success of the movement and tools, the impact on job seekers, and project milestones. These outcome metrics must be identified and gathered from the beginning, as they will lay the foundation for proof points and policy changes for the future. The collaborative should set specific, measurable goals for the movement, rooted in job seekers’ successes.

In order to ensure that the goals of the collaborative job seeker tools are being met, it is important to develop and monitor key metrics of success. Are workers using the resources that have been generated? Are they finding the resources useful? Are they achieving the intended outcomes? Are there mechanisms in place to collect user feedback? Creating these evaluative feedback loops will ensure that the needs of workers are central to each conversation and improve the opportunities to both identify and fulfill their data needs. These feedback loops will also help identify areas for improvement.

Checklist

Identify specific metrics that are aligned with the stated goals of the project and related movement. Be sure to include both leading and lagging metrics - leading metrics can be measured early or immediately, such as usage, which contribute to the lagging metrics like hiring increases.
Develop a method for collecting data for these metrics.
Early, often, and at regular intervals, collect and analyze the performance data.
Make the results of the analysis transparent through public-facing dashboards and reports, when possible.
Based on the information gathered, create a plan for improvements.
Work with policymakers and other decision-makers to create a plan of action based on findings.
Use accountability processes to ensure equity.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What are the overall goals of the movement?
How will the tools measurable improve the lives of job seekers and employers?
How can we communicate about successful and weak points – including how we will improve those – in the future?

Private Sector

How can your services contribute to data collection and analysis?
What is your role in helping to disseminate the results and provide recommendations to stakeholders?
For third party application developers, how can platform usage data be made available to the public as an additional data resource?

Philanthropy

What are the important lessons to be learned from previous work?
What are the metrics that show that the project has been successful?
What is a reasonable timeframe to demonstrate project success?

Resources and Examples

Brighthive tip on third party app developers: If data can reveal gaps in the training programs or skills available that individuals in a specific geography are searching for but not finding, this information could be used by training providers to modify their offerings.
The Urban Institute, Changing Workforce Systems: An example for how to describe and measure systems change.

PLAY 7

Create a Movement

Job seeker tools that are part of a larger movement are more likely to have an impact. Job seekers, employers, and other stakeholders will coalesce around a call to action, or a campaign to improve economic outcomes for a given population. To build a stronger foundation for a better functioning ecosystem, job seekers will need information, resources, and services to come together in a seamless and more easily navigable way that they can trust.

Campaigns with intentional goals, a call to action, and a specific plan for achieving the goals can drive support and stakeholder buy-in. Tools that are anchored in a larger movement will ultimately better serve the job seekers, intermediaries trying to help job seekers, and localities and states. Creating a movement brings a larger sense of purpose and meaning. A movement will also provide a broader foundation for sustainability.

Checklist

Evaluate the needs of job seekers, the state (or other geographical area), and employers.
Identify gaps in what is available, and to whom, and what needs resonate loudly with communities.
Recruit stakeholders who have an interest in job seekers to participate in the coalition.
Set attainable and measurable goals.
Develop a communications and outreach plan.
Incorporate various viewpoints.

Key Questions

Public Agencies

What is the specific need? Who is the intended audience?
What kinds of public agencies and private vendors can best guide the development of a tool?

Private Sector

What exists in the ecosystem?
How might the vendor’s specific skill set add to the conversation and resources available?
What are the appropriate public sector agencies to engage?

Philanthropy

What is the need?
What is already being done in the state/region?
How can efforts be additive, rather than duplicative?
How will additional funding enhance existing work?

Resources and Examples

Brighthive tip on collaborative tool development: Each participating stakeholder may have a slightly different reason or subpopulation they are most interested in. Utilize the different priorities to ensure that various user personas are considered in the design and implementation of data and tools. Stakeholders can serve as subject matter experts and content creators for their specific users.
Return Stronger Arizona: This solution connects job seekers with local career counselors who will provide guidance and recommendations on programs and services aligned with their specific employment goals.