YUPRO Placement, the industry-leading skills-first placement firm, is launching its #skillsfirstjobsnow campaign that brings together an ecosystem of employers, workforce development organizations, and upskilling providers that commit to hiring, training, and elevating traditionally overlooked talent. YUPRO Placement also joins the Tear the Paper Ceiling coalition, along with YUPRO Placement’s parent organization Year Up, Inc., for organizations to remove hiring barriers for talent skilled through alternative routes (STARs), rather than through a bachelor’s degree. This builds a more equitable workforce based on skills, abilities, and competencies instead of degrees, pedigree, and formal qualifications.
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Employers are able to fill critical talent vacancies, and talent are placed in career-progressing jobs at higher wages, while benefiting from our lifetime career and wraparound support services, upskilling programs, and professional development offerings.
“Through this campaign, employers commit to skills-first hiring practices with actual hiring goals and can publicly showcase their commitment,” said YUPRO Placement CEO Michelle Sims. “They have access to our National Opportunity Workforce which is comprised of more than 100,000 highly motivated and ready-to-work STARs from our exclusive network of nonprofit training providers. Employers are able to fill critical talent vacancies, and talent are placed in career-progressing jobs at higher wages, while benefiting from our lifetime career and wraparound support services, upskilling programs, and professional development offerings.”
“Year Up’s corporate partners have known for more than 20 years the tremendous value of hiring for skills over degrees,” said Gerald Chertavian, Year Up Founder and CEO. “With this campaign, YUPRO Placement will help employers across the country access a pipeline of skilled, career-ready talent that will take their organizations to the next level.”
Nationwide, companies face both early and mid-career hiring challenges and talent skills gaps to meet business demands. It’s essential that companies find partners that can source nontraditional, skilled talent on demand. YUPRO Placement designs term-time work experiences incorporating upskilling pathways with industry-recognized partners, such as IBM SkillsBuild, Grow with Google, Cisco Academy, Infosec Institute, a part of Cengage Work, and OpenClassrooms, that elevate the earn and learn hiring model so employers can reach untapped talent and assess on-the-job skills before committing to a full-time hire. This evolution of an informal apprenticeship program and hiring STARs for tech, cybersecurity, business and financial operations, HR, and marketing roles is a sustainable skills-based hiring strategy that creates a lasting talent advantage for employers.
“STARs are half of our skilled workforce. If employers don’t have a STARs talent strategy, they only have half a talent strategy,” said Opportunity@Work CEO & Co-Founder Byron Auguste. “Tearing the paper ceiling is about bringing in talent based on skills over degrees and performance over pedigree. This is innovation by inclusion – tapping into all talents and valuing workers’ skills by whatever route they gained them.”
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When hiring STARs, employers open up job opportunities for over 70 million Americans blocked by the paper ceiling – which includes college degree requirements. This hiring barrier affects 76% of Black Americans and 83% of Latinx Americans that do not hold a four-year degree, but who have built their skills through internships, workforce development training, industry-recognized certifications, bootcamps, on-the-job learning, and community college classes. This approach is crucial for organizations to foster inclusive opportunity and racial equity. It also gives them a competitive advantage because diverse organizations are more likely to financially outperform their peers, thus making investments in recruiting and hiring STARs pivotal to any talent acquisition strategy.
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