WELFARE POOL GOLD MINE FOR BANKS IN TELLER HUNT: ILLINOIS INSTITUTIONS FORM PARTNERSHIPS WITH COLLEGES TO RECRUIT, TRAIN EMPLOYEES

Two years ago, when Pullman Bank & Trust’s Deborah Daniels needed to hire a teller, she’d go shopping at a nearby Chicago mall, where she’d find candidates among the sales clerks.

These days, she heads instead to an even unlikelier recruiting spot: a community college on the North Side of Chicago that offers job-training programs geared to welfare recipients.

“I go there first,” says Ms. Daniels, assistant vice-president of human resources at Pullman, who helped design the teller-training program at Chicago’s Wright College.

It isn’t a charitable impulse that motivates her to hire people making the difficult transition from welfare to work.

“It’s a terrible, terrible labor market,” says Ms. Daniels, who hires about two dozen tellers annually for Pullman, a South Side Chicago neighborhood bank with two branches.

Banks have never been the first stop for the chronically unemployed. But the extraordinarily tight labor market — Illinois unemployment is at an all-time low — is making it harder for banks to fill entry-level jobs such as teller positions. Vacancies are frequent: Loop-based Harris Bank, for instance, with more than 140 branches, hires the equivalent of one teller every day.

“We needed a broader reach,” says Ken Windisch, vice-president of human resources at Harris, who hired two dozen bank tellers in the past year from the Wright College program.

Mr. Windisch is swift to dismiss any altruistic motives: “It’s self-serving; we need quality people.”

While the transportation, health care and hospitality industries have led the charge in bringing welfare recipients into the work force, banks are just now beginning to recruit such workers.

Their entry-level employees — chiefly tellers — must demonstrate cash-handling, computer and customer service skills. These days, people with such skills generally already are working.

education comes first

So, like manufacturers and trade unions before them, banks are now teaching job-specific skills to people, many of whom have never before been able to find — or keep — a job.

Harris is not alone in casting its net among the chronically unemployed: First National Bank of Chicago, Northern Trust Co., LaSalle National Bank, TCF Bank Illinois, Firstar Bank Illinois, American National and Lincoln Park Savings Bank are among the local financial institutions forming community partnerships to recruit and train workers.

The road to Wright College’s classroom wasn’t easy. Bankers first had to persuade skeptical educators to include them in welfare-to-work training programs.

“We thought it was a dying field, with ATMs and consolidation,” says Cynthia Clontz of banking and its automated cash dispensing machines. She is dean of continuing education and training at Wright, and remembers saying to herself about a proposed bank-training program, “I don’t think we’ll be doing this.”

But a few phone calls and meetings with bankers dispelled doubts. Not only are teller positions plentiful, they pay on par with entry-level jobs at fast-food restaurants and other retail outlets, while offering a more promising future. Good tellers can quickly move on to better-paying bank jobs.

first step up

“It’s the first rung in a real career,” says Nancy Bellew, a work force development specialist at Wright who worked with Ms. Daniels and others in developing the teller-training classes. The program also will be offered at other branches of City Colleges of Chicago.

“It’s very acceptable to have worked as a bank teller, (and) there’s a lot of prestige associated with working in a bank,” Ms. Bellew says.

And the many skills required for a teller’s job can easily be transferred to other industries, she adds.

Wright College’s 13-week teller program, now in its second year, is not limited to people making the transition from welfare to work, though that’s the sector it chiefly serves. The current session is made up entirely of welfare recipients, whose $1,500 tuition is covered by state vouchers.

Participants must have a high school diploma or its equivalent, pass reading and math tests and pass muster in interviews with bank executives.

Each session is limited to 25 students, and fewer than one in four applicants is accepted. But 95% of those who complete the program get bank jobs paying no less than $8 an hour and as much as $9.75 an hour, plus benefits.

Alicia Alamo, a longtime welfare recipient, is now a Harris Bank teller.

“I like the promotions, and the regular paycheck,” says the 37-year-old mother of five who once again found herself unemployed two years ago after Chicago Fish House, a seafood wholesaler, went belly-up and she lost the back-office job she’d held for six months. She had always been interested in banks — “I wanted a career” — and had applied at one, but says she was turned down for lack of cash-handling skills.

The Wright College program brought Ms. Alamo up to speed, and she landed an $8-an-hour entry-level spot that within a year turned into a head teller position, which pays about $10 an hour. Now, she’s training new hires.

A teller’s quick ascension is music to the ears of government workers who face the daunting task of moving an estimated 60,000 Illinois residents off the welfare rolls this year.

“We’re extremely surprised: Banks give us ongoing job orders,” says Carol Watson-Evans, manager of the employer clearinghouse at the Illinois Department of Human Services. “These are good jobs that have benefits and prospects for advancement.”

But financial institutions remain forbidding places for the longtime unemployed.

“Our clients are afraid to interview” at banks, says Ms. Watson-Evans.

what to wear?

Lack of a professional wardrobe presents yet another barrier, so the Wright curriculum includes a stop outside the classroom at the Bottomless Closet, a non-profit group that collects clothes; students receive a “makeover” and two interview outfits. When they land a job, they’re given enough clothing for a month.

“Welfare-to-work seems to have triggered a lot of more careful thought to actually assist people,” says Spruiell Weber White, senior program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is interested in welfare-to-work issues. “I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen by local banks.”

The number of people employed is still small, he says, “but it gives you some idea of what can be done.”

Crain News Service