As more than one million people come off furlough, Recro Consulting has called for all job seekers and work coaches to have access to transparent data on the performance of programmes designed to help people back into work.
Recro Consulting is an employability and recruitment solutions consultancy and training company whose award-winning programmes are seen as the most effective in the UK at helping people get back into work.
Many of Recro's programmes have seen at least 50 per cent of people return to employment, with participants often describing their experience with these programmes as ‘life changing’.
However, while the government is spending billions of pounds on getting people back into work, Recro’s senior leadership team is concerned about the levels of that investment that are truly going into effective support that will change lives.
John McDonough, founder and managing director of Recro Consulting, calls the system for getting people back into work “broken” and has called for greater transparency in the help to work programmes that are on offer.
He said: “The system is broken and is often not doing what it is supposed to do. It really doesn’t need to be so complicated and inefficient. Everyone should have the right to access the best possible support available and that is currently not the case. No one can give me a good reason why that isn’t the case.
“The most obvious place to start would be for job seekers and their work coach to be able to see the performance of programmes. If a national programme is getting 13 per cent back into work, another programme gets eight per cent into work and yet another gets 22 per cent into work, that can be disheartening to start with. But if Recro often get 50 per cent plus back into work, isn’t that what everyone should have access to?”
McDonough believes that if the UK government is to truly deliver on its ambitions of levelling up the country, then it must give the unemployed the best possible chance of getting back into stable employment.
“If the government want to level up, the first thing they should do is make a basic attempt for people to have the best chance of getting back into work”, he said.
“The number of job vacancies is increasing and so is the unemployment rate, but the real question is – how can the enormous number of available vacancies be filled properly and why are government’s programmes not that effective as they were rumoured to be? And why are these vacancies not being filled yet?”
