Elevate Rapid City: How Could We Guarantee a Job Interview?

After a couple of years of historically low unemployment numbers, Rapid City businesses were having trouble filling job opportunities.

Elevate Rapid City set out to address this issue by partnering with local nonprofits that serve communities facing barriers to economic mobility. The goal was to find a way to provide easier access to skills training and employment opportunities that provide a livable wage and benefits.

“Meeting with them and hearing about the struggles and barriers they face when seeking employment opportunities sparked an idea: What if we could guarantee a job interview? Help them get a foot in the door and provide assistance to help them have a successful interview,” said Reese Niu, Elevate Rapid City’s workforce planning director. “

The organization set out to develop micro-credentialing courses. It also worked to recruit a number of businesses willing to guarantee job interviews for candidates who completed the courses. They partnered with Western Dakota Technical College to create three courses. The first two are industry training courses for the health care and construction industries. The third is a soft skills course that focuses on areas crucial to employability, including teamwork, effective communication, time management and more. In order to get a guaranteed interview, participants have to take both their industry course and the soft skills course.

We chose the health care and construction industries because there are many entry level positions needed, but there is also a lot of different ways to upskill and get into higher positions,” Niu said. “We wanted to make sure that the economic mobility piece doesn’t stop with the entry-level position but that there is still a lot of room to grow.”  

For this program, Niu said it was also important to select nonprofit partners that have a record of success. Elevate Rapid City can provide the courses and guarantee an interview, but individuals living in poverty need wrap-around services to ensure their success continues once they complete the course.

With so many business and nonprofit partners involved in this initiative, Niu said the key to success is being flexible and open to feedback. The program has changed several times during development, but the changes made the program stronger because they were driven by feedback from those with boots on the ground working with their target communities.

She also stressed the importance of getting to know your community by going boots on the ground. Research and data is great, but there is no replacement for the knowledge you’ll gain by shadowing case managers, talking to people utilizing these services and actually seeing from their perspective what is needed when you are building this type of program.

Elevate Rapid City can use its online platform to track how many individuals register for and complete the courses to measure the success of the program. Their partners are also helping them track the number of interviews completed and how many hires result from those interviews. They’ve also agreed to help them track the economic mobility of the individuals once they are hired, looking at retention and promotions.  

The organization is already looking at adding new courses, including manufacturing and entrepreneurship. “We want to share the knowledge that entrepreneurship is also a pathway of economic mobility,” Niu said. “We want to be sure the target group we are trying to reach also has accessibility to entrepreneurship knowledge and education.”