Our employment adviser has been on long term sick leave since 1 January. The colleague who covered for her doesn’t have the same experience of supporting people with job searches. Nonetheless, with the help of Newground Together, the Brelms Trust and the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, we were able to support 32 local jobseekers who would otherwise have received no locally based support.
11 of our service users either had no UK work experience or needed further training to be job ready for the areas of work they were interested in. Most were seeking employment support to comply with Job Centre Plus requirements for qualifying for JSA. Six were enrolled into IT training, one into ESOL classes and four into volunteering (two of them with us). Five found permanent employment after receiving one-to-one support and three more were helped to move from temporary or part-time to permanent or full-time employment.
We invested considerable resources into helping Ikea to engage local residents onto their recruitment programme for a new store which they are opening in East Sheffield and where offering jobs to local people was a condition of their planning consent. According to their publicity there are 480 new job opportunities. We put forward 9 applicants for the recruitment process, of which 3 reached the final assessment in a three stage process. We are also aware of 17 young people who were local applicants but did not receive any support from us because they were aged 19 or under. To the best of our knowledge only three of these younger applicants got beyond the first stage and none was successful. We are seeking feedback.
