WELCOME BACK
Companies help stay-at-home moms, dads return to workforce
Gloria Samayoa at SapientNitro’s Miami office has been sifting through resumes as the New Yorkbased digital marketing agency expands its new career return program to her office. The 12-week paid program for advertising professionals, which piloted in New York and Toronto, has spread to Chicago, Atlanta and London. It has led to full-time positions in some of those cities for people — particularly stay-at-home mothers — who had taken time off work and wanted to return.
In Miami, Samayoa has been surprised by the resumes she has received: An equal number of men and women are applying for the office’s return-to-work program. “There are all kinds of reasons why the men took a pause from their careers,” she said. “It’s just as difficult for them to come back in where they left off.”
Even as the economy rebounded, people have continued to take breaks from the workforce for a variety of reasons, whether to start a family, care for a sick or elderly family member, travel or tackle an illness of their own. Unless they keep their skills up, re-entering the workforce with a resume gap can be a challenge, particularly as technology has changed the modern workplace.
Now, return-to-work programs are popping up in various industries providing mid-career internships for caregivers who have been out of the workforce for a few years or more. With most programs, mentoring support is provided to the returner.
There are about 160 active re-entry programs globally across industries, and more U.S. companies have committed to rolling out programs by year-end, according to a list compiled by iRelaunch, a company that works with employers and returning professionals.
These individuals, typically in theirs 40s, have something unique to offer the employer who understands their value, said Carol Fishman Cohen, the chief executive and co-founder of iRelaunch. They bring more workplace experience and usually have moved past the stage of needing future career breaks, unlike their younger counterparts. Cohen said iRelaunch is the largest supplier of candidates to Wall Street re-entry programs and has drawn more than 15,000 people to its return-to-work conferences and workshops all over the country — about 7 percent of them men.
In Miami, Akerman law firm is recruiting candidates for the office’s re-entry program that will launch in 2017 as part of a nationwide OnRamp Fellowship program. Ackerman already has brought on a lawyer in its New York office through the OnRamp program, which matches experienced women returning from career breaks with law firms, legal departments and financial services firms.
In Toronto, Ellen Kalis chose to leave her job in public relations to be home with her son, who has cerebral palsy. At the time, she saw herself as confident and driven. But four years later, when she decided to return to work, she began
second-guessing her abilities. “I wondered how my resume would even get into HR’s hands and assumed it would be tossed to the side as soon as they saw the gap in my career,” Kalis said.
Fortunately, a family member led Kalis toward an emerging path back to employment: SapientNitro’s program. Similar to an internship, it paired Kalis with a mentor in the New York office who helped her transition into a permanent job as the public relations lead for SapientNitro in Canada and the Midwest.
“With all the changes in digital, it was like everyone was speaking a whole new language, but the advantage of the program was that there was an onboarding process,” she said.
Donald Chesnut, executive creative director at SapientNitro in New York, says even with compelling credentials, a resume gap is difficult to overlook in a job candidate: “While we value their experience, if they had applied for these mid-level jobs they would not have made it in.”
Some larger companies are starting return-to-work groups as large as 25 people at a time, and may bring in several cohorts throughout the year in multiple departments. The success rates for permanent hiring are as high as 90 percent, said Cohen of iRelaunch.
So far, online education platform Coursera, grocery delivery startup Instacart, as well as customer service software company Zendesk, marketing technology company Demandbase, and CloudFlare, a contentdistribution network, all announced that starting this month, they will offer 18-week “returnships” to men and women through Path Forward.
With an estimated 2 million stay-at-home fathers, Simon Isaacs, co-founder of Fatherly.com, a New York-headquartered parenting resource site for fathers, expects to see more men who want to participate in these programs. For them, the transition back can be particularly daunting.
Along with return-towork programs, Isaacs suggests working parents consider flexible jobs open to people with resume gaps at companies participating in the sharing economy such as TaskRabbit and Lyft.