Meet the nonprofit leader helping JPMorgan, Alphabet, and other companies hire 100,000 low-income New Yorkers by 2030

It’s not just your old roommate, saddled with loans, who thinks colleges are failing to prepare students for their careers.

Top CEOs, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, think so too, particularly when it comes to low-income workers. In fact, they’re among the 27 CEOs who formed the New York Jobs CEO Council which, since 2020, has sought to help underprivileged New Yorkers land out-of-reach corporate jobs.

The nonprofit, led by executive director Kiersten Barnet, works with secondary and higher ed schools and member companies on a host of initiatives aimed at placing workers into “family-sustaining” jobs, or those paying around $69,000 annually. Its goal is to get 100,000 low-income New Yorkers hired by 2030; it reached 40,000 by the end of 2023.

Barnet previously spent 14 years at Bloomberg, serving as deputy chief of staff and helping implement company initiatives for its 19,000 global employees, before leading social ESG initiatives.

During pandemic-era lockdowns, Barnet, then pregnant with her second child and witnessing exacerbating wealth inequality in NYC, wanted to enact change locally.

“Being a mother in New York has just made me so much more aware of the community here that I’m raising my children in, and New York particularly at that time was not at its best,” Barnet, who joined the Council in 2022, told HR Brew. “When an opportunity came to take a different data driven approach…where instead of [addressing] disparities within the workplace it’s before you even have those opportunities, and to go from something that was very global to something local, was really appealing.”

Pipeline fix. The Council has primarily worked with CUNY students, who are majority lower-income. Its partnership encompasses several initiatives aimed at bridging gaps between employers’ hiring practices and schools’ adeptness at preparing students for careers.

“You have some of the world’s largest businesses right here, and then you have 250,000 CUNY students, and there has traditionally been such a disconnect,” Barnet said.

One initiative involves educating students about how member companies hire. For example, a senior finance major interested in a job at JPMorgan might not know most of the bank’s entry-level talent comes in through internship programs starting the summer before their junior year, and miss that opportunity.

Member companies’ recruiters also conduct mock interviews with students and offer career-readiness guidance, like how to use LinkedIn or Handshake.

The Council also has longer-term projects, including curriculum reviews to ensure alignment with business needs, and “earn-and-learn” programs, through which students work paid entry-level jobs in business and tech fields for 12 weeks while pursuing coursework. It developed a similar program for high school students.

Around 15 degree programs at seven community colleges have done curriculum reviews and “earn-and-learn” programs. While only 100 students have participated, most have converted into full-time hires—and employers have been able to mold them to their specific organization, Barnet said.

“Not only are companies able to hire students with a two year degree that they traditionally hired for four but…they have this 12-week try before you buy,” Barnet said.

Most hired students have seen higher offer and retention rates compared to overall hires at member companies in the NYC area, with retention rates hitting 87% in 2023.

Hitting 100k. The Council is trying to help 100,000 low-income New Yorkers land jobs at a time when employers are hiring less and backtracking on DEI.

Member companies hired 40% less in the New York metro area in 2024 than during the Great Resignation. Amid this shift, the Council is targeting growing occupations. Healthcare, for example, added more jobs in 2024 (up 17% YoY nationally) than any other industry. Four of NYC’s largest healthcare institutions are member companies that “can’t fill seats fast enough," Barnet said. Many of these well-paying jobs require specific certifications that students can work toward while performing lower-barrier roles.

“One of the blind spots we had when we initially started was there’s a lot of jobs that may not pay [family-sustaining wages], but they might be ones where you can do them right out of high school or with a certification or with a two year degree, and they’re on a pathway to those jobs,” Barnet said.

She said that of the 40,000 hired, around 70% were people of color, potentially making the Council’s work vulnerable to the repercussions of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action rollback and corporate America’s DEI backtracking, in which some member companies have participated.

However, member companies’ commitment to addressing income disparities seems to have remained constant, Barnet said.

“No way have we seen our companies in any way backing down from all the initiatives and programs that we do,” Barnet said. “I think they understand that exceptional companies are built on exceptional talent, and this is part of getting exceptional talent. I also think that it is harder for people to be polarized around investing in your own community.”