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Mentor Graphics is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon. In recent months, Oregon's unemployment rate has been headline news as the country's second highest at over 12%. Not only has our company and state suffered from the poor economy, but our customer base has seen dramatic job losses as engineering unemployment sets new records.
In order to reach out to our unemployed customer community locally, nationally, and even internationally, we launched the online version of our Displaced Worker Community in February 2009.
Although resources were limited, we wanted to expand the program originally started when the economy slowed down in 2002. Social media tools provided the most powerful accelerators of community reach, so we used a combination of social media building blocks including an online community for networking & communication, plus eLearning infrastructure for online training delivery, and a seminar series to teach displaced workers how to set up a searchable online profile.
1. Online Community: The central portal for the initiative is an Employment & Training Community where participants can network with peers, post resumes, and ask questions of the Displaced Worker Community.
2. Complimentary training: Training on Mentor Graphics software is offered to displaced electronics engineers and designers where we have capacity in our Live Online Classes and Mentor Graphics Public Training Centers.
With Live Online Training, launched in March 2009, Mentor remotely downloads a virtual environment to the customer's computer that includes training software, license files, and Web 2.0 online course delivery tools. This format enables us to deliver more classes to displaced workers because travel isn't required for either the instructor or the students. The instructor is remote from the class participants, but the software runs locally, and the teaching and lab interaction between instructor and students is real-time.
3. Job Search Support: The Mentor Graphics recruiting team, with 50+ years of combined hiring experience, delivered job search guidance to unemployed engineers through a series of evening seminars presented online and in 5 locations across the United States. Since many customers in our community have enjoyed steady employment for most of their careers, social networking wasn't a job search tool when most of our attendees had last searched for work. Therefore, the recruiting team focused on how to effectively create a visible online presence using our Jobs Wanted community and tools like Linked-In.
We also collaborated with Volt Workforce Solutions to have technical recruiters available at each of the in-person events to talk with the attendees.
To get the word out about the seminar series within the local markets, we leveraged networking sites like door64 in Austin, where many of our attendees learned about the event. Also each of the physical locations coincided with cities where we have offices. Another effective tool for promotion was communication to the local employees. They enthusiastically posted and forwarded information through their personal networks. To further increase awareness, our PR team tweeted and alerted the local press.
The recorded presentation is now available in our Employment & Training Community for those who were not able to attend.
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