An employment scheme for refugees with PIETRA

For more than 24 years, the CeCler association has been fighting against the exclusion of people in need in the Clermont-Ferrand metropolitan area. Its mission is to facilitate their reintegration into society and employment by using four levers: housing, health care, support towards autonomy and adapting to the workplace.

The association responded to the invitation to tender for a project launched by the French Ministry of Employment at the end of 2018 in a context of increasing migratory flow. The objective was to speed up the reemployment of refugees as part of a skills investment program.

CeCler was selected for the project and put forward PIETRA (standing for integrated enterprise and local area mobilization and acceleration platform), an innovative experimental scheme designed to lift the obstacles to the reemployment of refugees in the Puy-de-Dôme area.

As an exchange platform, PIETRA aims to respond to the recruitment needs of businesses in the Puy-de-Dôme area while providing real, durable jobs to refugees under international protection. Two separate services are on offer:

• The first targets refugees that CeCler helps in their search for lasting employment. The program is planned to last 12 months at the most. There are two aspects. Support towards employment based on skills development and focused on learning workplace behaviors. The second is support in the workplace to ensure recruitment is guaranteed right up until the new hire has been assimilated into the company.
• The second service is geared towards businesses that CeCler helps in defining their human resource requirements and supplying matching candidates. It also has two aspects: an assistance towards recruitment and support for new hires in their assimilation into the workplace.

The project is based on solid partnerships and mobilizes the whole local ecosystem. It has managed to bring together a network of more than 200 organizations in different sectors such as hotels and restaurants, construction, servicing and cleaning, handling and logistics. The scheme has met with success and by November 1st, 2020, 201 refugees had already benefitted from it.

Co-funded for three years, notably by Michelin Corporate Foundation, the platform is intended to become over time a permanent economic model.