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Fort Worth organizations that are hiring or laying people off have a new online resource they can use to find prospects or connect their furloughed workers to new jobs.
The COVID-19 Workforce Connector Platform is an initiative of Fort Worth’s Best Place for Working Parents group, which earlier this year gave out its first awards for workplaces during Mayor Betsy Price’s State of the City lunch.
Partners in the Workforce Connector are the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Hillwood, the Shiftsmart online staffing plaform, United Way of Tarrant County, and Workforce Solutions.
Businesses in Tarrant County, human resource executives, nonprofits, and organizations that have immediate hiring or workforce reduction needs of 10 or more people are welcome to participate by completing a two-minute confidential survey at the Workforce Connector site.
“In the midst of unprecedented business disruption and chaos, Fort Worth has come together as a community to support our local businesses and facilitate creative solutions to workforce challenges due to the COVID-19 crisis,” Best Place for Working Parents said.
"Fort Worth innovates yet again," Brandom Gengelbach, president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, said in a release. “Fort Worth’s COVID-19 Workforce Connector Platform is specifically designed to ensure that our employers who are navigating uncharted waters when it comes to meeting workforce demands are supported. If we can be a conduit between employers who are facing reduction needs and other who are scaling up, we hope that this ultimately benefits not only employers, but also employees and their families.”
Shiftsmart is a staffing platform. Business leaders Anurag Jain and Patrick Brandt, the Shiftsmart president, recently launched the nonprofit Get Shift Done for North Texas Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas. The fund pays for volunteer shifts at local nonprofits for furloughed food and beverage workers. Jain and Brandt committed a total $750,000 to launch Get Shift Done and quickly increased the fund to more than $3 million in commitments.
Restaurants are among the hardest hit by COVID-19, first forced into social distancing requirements and then to shut down to all but takeout and delivery orders. The Texas Restaurant Association projects the state’s restaurants will shed more than 688,000 jobs and lose $4.2 billion in sales by the end of April. The TRA estimates that’s about a 70% drop in sales.
Get Shift Done, using the Shiftsmart platform, has been working on finding temporary work for furloughed workers at nonprofits like food banks that have seen demand skyrocket. Get Shift done ran a pilot at the North Texas Food Bank, where Jain is chairman.
“There was a real opportunity to place and match these displaced food workers,” Brandt said. Shiftsmart’s technology “allows us to do high-volume, high-velocity scheduling. We were off and running.”
Both said they thought the furloughs triggered by COVID would be short. “We thought we were trying to do a bridge,” Brandt said. But “things evolved into a full-on shelter-in-place, then huge layoffs.”
