Whenever Anjelicia stepped out of her back door in Memphis, Tennessee, she could see the red heart logo of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, a place where she had always wanted to work but could never land a job. It wasn’t until Anjelicia found Hire Local, a sectoral training program in the health care field led by the Memphis Medical District Collaborative, that she was able to gain the skills and connections she needed to get hired, and to show her three sons what she could accomplish, as featured in this video.

Many Memphis job seekers face barriers to getting quality jobs, as detailed in a 2025 report.  Candidates from nontraditional backgrounds may be overlooked, even when they have the requisite skills and experience. Memphis Works for Everyone (MemWorks), a partnership between MDRC and Slingshot Memphis, aims to strengthen pathways to living-wage jobs and economic mobility for Memphis workers. Through MemWorks, MDRC has partnered with Hire Local to design and implement new training programs to help more Memphis residents obtain quality jobs.

Sectoral programs such as Hire Local train people for jobs in industries and occupations where there is strong local demand and opportunities for career advancement. Evidence from studies of similar training models has found them to be among the most effective strategies in workforce development. Research shows that sectoral program graduates are more likely to gain credentials and increase their earnings in both their initial job placement and in subsequent jobs.

Since 2018, Hire Local has created a pipeline of skilled workers for the major medical institutions in the Memphis area. MDRC interviewed Hire Local’s leaders to learn more about the program’s approach to building and maintaining employer partnerships to facilitate connections to quality jobs.

Create an Employer Council

Hire Local was inspired by The Skills Initiative in Philadelphia to form an employer council, a group of industry and community leaders who meet to codevelop training and hiring solutions for workers and businesses in the local workforce ecosystem. “Working alongside health care employers—and investing the time to understand their operations—is essential to effective workforce alignment,” said Latasha Harris, Senior Director of Workforce Strategy at Hire Local.

As the employer council took shape, Hire Local invited participating employers to send over hiring and termination data. With this information, Hire Local was able to assess hiring patterns and talent gaps, or areas with a high demand for trained workers, across its employer network. This cross-institutional perspective allowed Hire Local to design training programs to directly address the demand for skilled workers in the community. “Employers are clear about what they care about,” Harris said. “Our job is to listen closely and build solutions that respond directly to those priorities.”

Currently, Hire Local’s employer council maintains the following principles:

• Meet regularly and often. Hire Local’s employer council meets monthly to discuss training and hiring challenges and determine solutions.
   
• Invite community leaders, not just employers. Hire Local’s employer council includes human resources representatives from local employers, workforce development partners, philanthropic partners, and community members to offer different perspectives.
   
• Over time, set up memorandums of understanding with participating employers and training providers. Such agreements will help clarify the expectations of the partnership.

In addition, Hire Local has monthly meetings with key employer partners to review program participant outcome data and to share observations. Over the years, training and hiring solutions have emerged from a deeper understanding of employers’ needs and experiences.

Build a “Proof Point” for Employers

In the early stages of partnership development, Hire Local found that although employers were willing to meet, they were reluctant to deepen their partnerships by offering hiring commitments or guaranteeing interviews with Hire Local graduates. “We needed to build a proof point before we asked [employers] to take a risk on candidates,” Harris said. Programs like Hire Local should demonstrate their value before expecting employers to make commitments.

To address this reticence, Hire Local conducted needs assessments with employers to better understand their hiring and retention challenges. Employers, in turn, helped influence the design of the skills-based training curricula based on their hiring needs. As employers hired initial graduates and gradually observed them performing effectively in the workplace, their confidence in Hire Local grew, as did their willingness to deepen their commitments.

Hire Local offers the following guidance for setting expectations for employer partnerships:

• Focus on one or two employer champions. Start small and focus on one or two employer partners that seem most closely aligned with your program’s goals, values, and job placement needs.
   
• Don’t expect too much, too soon. Building trust takes time. It might take years of consistent effort to build the foundation needed for employer partners to pledge guaranteed interviews or hiring commitments.

Today, trust is the foundation of Hire Local’s partnership standards. After years of joint effort, Hire Local now requires all its employer partners to guarantee interviews for program graduates. By setting clear partnership standards, Hire Local ensures that employer engagement translates into real economic gains for workers and not just job placements. “At this point, guaranteed interviews are the baseline,” Harris said. “If an employer isn’t willing to meet that standard, we don’t send talent.”

Use Relationships to Advocate for Workers’ Needs

By building trusting relationships with employers, Hire Local put itself in a better position to advocate for training program graduates and to uphold its core values, such as connecting graduates with jobs that pay living wages. “Early on, there was an employer we were eager to partner with, but their starting wages did not yet align with our minimum standards,” Harris said. “We stayed consistent about our expectations and over time they adjusted their pay to better align with the program.”

Hire Local’s approach focuses not only on preparing people for work, but also on ensuring that workplaces can help program graduates thrive. The development of a needs assessment was central to finding common ground between workers’ and employers’ needs, offering employers a structured way to reflect on their hiring processes.

In one example, a needs assessment highlighted how an employer’s lengthy hiring process, spanning up to 60 days, was inconvenient and draining for both the job seeker and the employer. Working together, Hire Local and the employer reimagined and streamlined the hiring process so that training program graduates could begin to work in as little as two weeks. This solution enabled graduates to transition to stable employment more quickly and allowed employers to fill vacancies more efficiently, a solution that worked well for everyone.

Next Up: Expanding for the Future

As a new program graduate, Anjelicia joined Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in an entry-level role with the Environmental Services team. Entry-level roles like this one helped Hire Local secure a foundation for career pathways in the health care field. Over time, building employer partnerships has enabled Hire Local to expand its training programs to more advanced training tracks, strengthening the hiring pipeline for employers and creating clearer routes for economic mobility for program graduates.

In 2025, Hire Local’s program, with the support of MDRC and Slingshot Memphis, expanded with three new training tracks: Emergency Medical Technician, Medical Assistant, and Licensed Practical Nurse. These careers were selected based on data that point to these careers being among the most economically mobile jobs in the Memphis health care sector. For Hire Local, jobs that pay living wages are now defined as positions paying at least $19 per hour with opportunities for advancement. These new training tracks enabled Hire Local to support four times as many job seekers on living-wage pathways in 2025 compared with the previous year. In 2026, Hire Local will continue to scale its program offerings to serve more Memphis job seekers and help employers connect with skilled talent.