Dressed For Success

Yvette Johnson was the kind of job applicant who makes employers dread hiring off the welfare rolls. She had been on welfare for six years. Jobs like cleaning hospital rooms and cutting vegetables ended with her quitting or being fired. And she had four kids who had to be shuttled to day care and baby-sitting. When Kimberly Randolph, an operations supervisor for the Sprint phone company in Kansas City, Mo., met Johnson at a job fair, she pegged Johnson as "a job hopper, with a bad attitude." But at her interview, Johnson made a plea. "That was me, and I know it doesn't look good," she said. "But give me a chance."

Johnson took her chance and ran with it. She woke up at 5 a.m. and spent two hours on buses, dragging the kids to day care and then getting to training classes. For nine months now, she has been an operator at Sprint's calling center at 18th and Vine, and she's a star. She sits at a computer with a headset on, placing calls and billing calling cards. She handles 600 calls a day, at an average of 38 seconds a call. Already, she has racked up four "good customer-contact reports" from satisfied callers who put in a good word with her supervisor.

Johnson is part of a small but impressive welfare-to-work program Sprint began last October in one of Kansas City's poorest neighborhoods. Sprint's 18th-and-Vine call center employs 48 operators, half of whom were on public assistance. The center is meeting its performance standards, and its 77% retention rate is more than twice as good as Sprint's call center in the Kansas City suburbs. That's a big deal in an industry where every employee departure can mean $6,000 to $15,000 in lost training and productivity. Sprint is thinking about upping the 18th-and-Vine staff to 100.

Sprint isn't alone on the welfare-to-work bandwagon. Of the top 100 U.S. companies, 34 have programs, and 13 more are planning them. Executives of such blue chips as United Airlines and Salomon Smith Barney were at the White House this spring toasting President Clinton's one-year-old Welfare to Work Partnership and saying their welfare hires had better retention rates than workers found from other sources. Why the sudden success? There's the economy, which has made employers so desperate that some are hiring convicts to work in prison. And there's welfare reform, which has drilled into recipients the fact that unemployment is no longer an option.

But welfare-to-work practitioners say one factor in its success has been a dramatic change in how welfare recipients are prepped for the work force. Old-fashioned job training used to teach typing or using computers but not the first thing about how to act on the job. The focus now is on "soft skills," basics like showing up on time, dressing appropriately and not fighting with co-workers. "Employers are saying, 'Give us people with the right attitude and job readiness, and we'll take care of the rest," says Eli Segal, president of the nonprofit Welfare to Work Partnership.