Refugees as Employees: Good Retention, Strong Recruitment

“In the United States, there is established recent research on how over time refugees become well integrated into society and how they fare in the economy, learning English, increasing their wages, owning homes, and starting businesses. Less attention, however, has been focused on the employer side of the resettlement story: What is the experience of businesses that hire refugees?

To investigate this question, the [authors] conducted in-depth interviews with employers of refugees in four geographic areas of the United States. All are major sites of refugee resettlement, yet they represent a wide range of economic situations, immigration experiences, and political contexts: Atlanta, Georgia and the surrounding counties; Phoenix, Arizona; upstate New York; and Eastern and Central Nebraska. To frame this research, [the authors] also conducted interviews with refugees, refugee resettlement agency staff, other service providers, researchers, and other members of the community to give context to [their] findings, conducting over 100 interviews in total. The research was further contextualized and guided by [the organization’s] analysis of data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Worldwide Refugee Processing System (WRAPS)” (p.9).

The report begins with an overview of findings and presents findings for each of the geographic areas studied. This section is followed by a review of refugee turnover and recruitment practices in the manufacturing, meat packing, hotels, and health care industries. The report also examines other industries, such as construction, commercial laundry, staffing companies, and high-tech manufacturing and offers a short section on refugees in the United States from 2008 to the present.
(Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

“[T]his study identified two clear differences that reflect ways employers benefit when they broaden their hiring pool to include refugees. 1) Refugees tend to stay with the same employer for longer than other hires. 19 of the 26 employers surveyed—73 percent—reported a higher retention rate for refugees than for other employees. This was consistent across industry sector and across geography” (p.9). “Several factors appear to be driving the comparatively high retention rate…: All workers value employers who make them feel welcome and respected, but refugees are especially responsive to a welcoming environment. Once they find it, they tend to stay with that employer….Refugees also tend to gravitate towards jobs that allow them to get by with limited English proficiency initially and learn the language on the job, and they also tend to stay longer with employers that provide this flexibility. Finally, refugees often prefer to work alongside other refugees – especially those who share their background – so employing multiple refugees also positively influences retention rates” (p.11). “2) Once employers create a positive relationship with the first few refugees, it opens the door for the recruitment of many others. The first time an employer hires one or several refugees, there is almost always a period of mutual accommodation. Some issues are likely to come up that have never arisen before and may take employers by surprise, although they are often easily manageable….Language barriers are a consistent challenge for new employers of refugees, and are in some ways a bigger challenge with refugees than with other immigrant groups…. Companies that make the effort to work these issues through, however, are often doubly repaid in both retention of the employees themselves and also in recruitment of other refugees. This recruitment advantage works at least three ways. One recruitment advantage comes from the tendency of members of the same ethnic group to seek employment at the same company….A second advantage comes from easier recruitment as firms develop relationships with refugee communities and build a practice of integration into their workforce….A final advantage is in the number of refugees who have no trouble getting through the multiple kinds of screening that are often required by employers….And, having already been extensively vetted by the U.S. government…they can easily pass a background test” (p.12-13). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2018
• Author(s): Dyssegaard Kallick, David and Roldan, Cyierra
• Organizational Author(s): The Tent Partnership for Refugees; The Fiscal Policy Institute
• Funding Source: Self-funded
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies