Active and Accountable Job Placement

Hostetler-Fontaine & Associates has been providing Vocational Rehabilitation and Job Placement services for more than 30 years. It has always been the philosophy of this organization that Vocational Rehabilitation, is by definition, goal-oriented toward employment.

If it is not possible for the injured worker to return to his or her original employment, Hostetler-Fontaine & Associates will then institute what we call “Active and Accountable rehabilitation and job development.”  While vocational evaluation, vocational testing, and vocational exploration are necessary, they are, in reality, just the preliminaries to the hard work of locating employment.

Active and Accountable job development includes performing weekly labor market surveys to locate employment opportunities for the client of services.  It also allows us to personally schedule appointments for the client to apply or interview for jobs.  Understanding that each case requires individualized attention and collaboration with the client, we are even able to escort the client to job interviews and facilitate placement.  It is also the vocational rehabilitation counselor’s and job developer’s responsibility to place phone calls to prospective employers within hours of the interview to follow up and gather feedback.

This provides us with a number of benefits. First, many of our clients respond more favorably to established appointments. Second, contacting the employer/interviewer following the interview provides additional incentives for the client/job-seeker to make a positive impression.

Prompt follow-up phone calls by the job developer keeps the candidate fresh in the employer’s mind. If, unfortunately, the  client leaves an unfavorable impression, it allows us an opportunity to moderate this outcome with the employer and revisit the clients job search activities and efforts. If the injured worker continues to leave poor impressions after continued vocational counseling, Active and Accountable job development allows us to document them thoroughly.

It is the goal of this organization to provide every opportunity for injured workers to return to employment as soon as reasonably possible. We, however, understand that there are some instances where this is not possible, and it is our responsibility to document the situation for future considerations.

In Active and Accountable job development, we try to avoid the peaks and valleys of our competitors’ typical job development and implement constant level of job search activity. Instead of handing a list of possible employers one time each month to the client and doing sporadic follow ups, we conduct up to 4 sessions of labor market surveys per month with subsequent employer follow up. This system has proven time and again to net the best results in the shortest amount of time.