When you start working for the state with the Department of Labor, your number one goal is to help people. But the longer you’re in your role, the more you’ll see people that come in once and then you might never hear from them again.
With younger people who don’t like physical meetings or phone calls, “ghosting” is becoming more and more common — even when you’re providing free help.
We talked to Danilo Cabrera, Bureau Chief for Idaho Department of Labor, and Summer MacDonald, Program Manager, to see how they’ve overcome these issues using Big Interview.
The challenge: Reaching Their Participants Online
In a digital world, Idaho needed to come up with solutions to continue serving their community.
When 2020 hit, things completely shifted. Their offices closed, everything went remote, and they knew they would have to adapt to a virtual environment.
That’s when they found Big Interview and realized it could impact their community and ensure case managers and career planners could make the most of their time and still provide much-needed services.
How Idaho reached their unemployed population using Big Interview:
- Directly assigning mock interviews to their clients, so even the “hard to reach” clients could benefit from their services at a time that worked for them and without having to meet with staff members in person.
- Giving users easy access to the platform directly with a few mouse clicks and a personalized email invitation.
- Looking at reports to find trends in engagement, including how their clients were scoring on mock interviews and what common interview challenges they were facing.
And by doing this they went from fewer than 100 people on Big Interview to over 300 a month.
What Are the Key Steps To Reach Engagement Goals?
Idaho was able to increase engagement with 4 key steps. We’ll walk you through each of those and how you can apply it to your community.
Step 1: Eliminate objections
To start, they wanted to make sure all of their staff members were comfortable with this new system so they would get them on board.
To do this for your organization, have talks with case managers and career planners to see how they feel about using Big Interview. Make sure to ask if they think it could work for them, and what hesitations they have.
Idaho pointed out that although career planners might not feel comfortable bringing it up, it is valid that they could think Big Interview will take their jobs or replace the level of service they are used to providing to their customers.
If you hear this kind of objection, reiterate that this is not the case, but that it’s here to make room for providing additional services to additional customers.
Emphasize how they can use Big Interview to help more people and find them jobs faster. If there are any specific things you can mention to show them how else using Big Interview can help enhance their customer support, this is even more helpful.
When this happened with Idaho, they explained to their career planners that they would still engage with customers by following up on Big Interview assignments, they could rate each of their clients individually and compare them as a group to see what common struggles are. This way they could be more on top of problems and propose solutions earlier on, while providing an opportunity for customers to practice interviews or work on resumes when it was convenient for them; not just during the Monday through Friday workday.
Lastly, show proof it works with success stories. Big Interview is proven to help users land jobs 5x faster than the current national average — make sure your staff knows that.
And if they want some examples of other states, you can talk about Ohio and Maryland where we served more than 18,000 people in 2023.
If you want any more information about this feel free to contact someone on the Big Interview team.
Step 2: Training, training, and more training
To make sure everyone knew about Big Interview and was using it the best they could, Idaho hosted internal training sessions.
In these sessions, they would talk about how using Big Interview could save time, they mentioned the different solutions we provide (like interview training and mock interview practice) and how to get to Big Interview and give access to customers.
On top of this, they monitored engagement and received feedback from staff. When it was determined that additional or refresher training was needed, they conducted in-house sessions, scheduled training with the Big Interview team and with the help of the Big Interview team created step-by-step guides on how to log in to Big Interview, create assignments for customers, and how a customer can navigate it.
✅ Pro Tip: They recommend meeting in smaller groups so career planners are more comfortable asking questions if they don’t know about something.
To get the training ball rolling for your organization, make sure any program managers are fully trained, aware of how Big Interview can be used, and the benefits it can provide customers and the organization.
Then, for the first 6 months, you should set up monthly meetings with your Big Interview Engagement Specialist and the case managers or career planners who are working with your customers.
Step 3: Pivot based on feedback
The key to helping more people is to make sure it’s easy for your case managers to do so.
After everyone knows about Big Interview and how it’ll help them, ask for feedback on where they are running into hiccups or if there are processes that could make it easier to share.
For example, when Idaho first started using Big Interview, their case managers had to ask for individual codes to give access to their customers. They realized this was causing a bottleneck and, once the option was available, switched to an email invitation process that allowed staff to easily send an email invitation so the customers could sign up themselves. This made the process much easier for everyone.
Make sure to keep asking for feedback after training and let your staff members know they can reach out to our support center at support.biginterview.com or through email at [email protected].
Step 4: Regular follow-ups
It’s not time to set it and forget it just yet. To make sure you are continuously reaching your community, you’ll need to find (and highlight) your power users.
Who gets the most of their clients on Big Interview? Who is using the assignments feature and following up with customers on their assignments?
Have one-on-one sessions with those people to see how they are successful with Big Interview. After this, Idaho recommends hosting peer learning sessions with the entire team where these “power users” can showcase their skills to other career planners.
This way your staff members can clearly see the benefit and how it’s helping their own team.
The Impact on the Community
Being proactive like Idaho was about going remote ensures your community is getting the most out of your services. The steps we outlined today helped them 3x their mock interview engagement, and they have only continued to grow since.
If you’re hoping to do the same with your community, reach out to your Big Interview contact and they’ll make sure you have all the steps you need to succeed.
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