A Community of Employers Piloting Innovative Talent Practices Anchored in Shared Value

We work to demonstrate the business value of rewiring talent practices and policies to meet changing demographics, improve outcomes for underemployed populations, and advance Opportunity Employment.

Talent Rewire is a non-profit catalyst for our community of employers to accelerate learning, build momentum, and serve as a marketplace of ideas and best practices. We emphasize experiential learning, user-centered design, systems thinking, and unlikely collaboration.

Since 2016, we’ve brought together dozens of national and regional employers with workforce providers and non-profit partners through our year-long Rewire Lab and have since expanded the ways we engage with employers in order to spread the benefits of Opportunity Employment to frontline employees across the country.

What is Opportunity Employment?

Opportunity Employment is a strategic approach to talent investment based on a set of principles and associated talent practices that prioritize equity, inclusion, opportunity, and mobility for entry-level and often overlooked frontline employees while generating business value.

Learn More about Opportunity Employment

Our Approach to Employer Engagement

Our community and programming are informed by a set of interrelated pillars that set the tone of engagement:

We are all teachers and learners.
We all know a lot, but none of us comes to this work knowing everything. We will have moments when we can lean into our expertise and share what we know with others. We will have moments when we find ourselves challenged by new content or new ways of thinking. We are here to share what we know and learn from each other.
The success of the intervention depends on the interior state of the intervener.
Inspired by Bill O'Brien, we believe that what we carry with us internally will be reflected in our work. We rely on different tools to build our internal awareness, including movement and mindfulness activities in order to better understand our motivations.
Systems get the outcomes observed and hold problems in place.
Instead of seeking where we can lay blame for the outcomes we want to change, we will explore the barriers our own system creates and how we might create specific interventions to address those barriers. We are empowered by the ability to own our system and the problem.
Business value is needed for internal and external adoption.
We must demonstrate the business value of opportunity employment in order to make the case for meaningful and lasting change within company talent systems. Interventions will be most effective when there is a demonstrated return on investment. With proof points we can also more effectively inspire new employers to engage in this work.
We engage with an open mind, open heart, and open will.
This work takes curiosity, compassion, and courage. We use Otto Scharmer’s Theory U to remind us to spend time in the messiness of the work and not jump to solving problems. We’ll implement approaches to problem solving grounded in systems thinking and design thinking to challenge our mental models and assumptions.
We will have more momentum by working together.
We are in this work together. As a community, we can support and inspire each other. With that encouragement we can achieve more together than we ever could alone. Not only do we increase our collective knowledge, but we can build on each other’s stories to spread the work we are doing.

Meet the Talent Rewire Team

We are passionate about helping employers better support their workforce and improve their bottom line.

Meet Our Team Members