Full Employment Award
Annually, the Institute selects a winner of its Full Employment Best Practices Award. The award is given to a state Unemployment Insurance agency, workforce agency or individual best exemplifying a commitment and dedication to reemployment of UI claimants.
2025 Full Employment Best Practices Award
The Texas Workforce Commission
RESEA Full Engagement Initiative
March 2026
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Overview
The Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) program funds state workforce and unemployment insurance (UI) programs to confirm claimants’ continuing UI eligibility and to provide reemployment services that help them land jobs and reduce their unemployment duration.
As part of its mission, over the past three years, TWC has dynamically enhanced its RESEA program with a new slate of innovative services built around valuable and engaging work search activities and tools, complete with AI-assisted features. The initiatives have strongly boosted UI claimant engagement, activity and reemployment impacts.
Details
In January 2023, TWC identified an opportunity to expand its RESEA program’s impact and, over the next three years, implemented four new strategies: 1) additional valuable activities for its initial RESEA meeting, 2) two subsequent RESEA meetings for those struggling, 3) a powerful resume enhancement tool, and 4) scalable and effective interview preparation activities. TWC strategically inserted these enhancements in its continuum of three RESEA meetings.
1. Initial RESEA Meeting – Enhanced Activities
TWC’s initial RESEA meeting provides all of the standard RESEA required elements, including, but not limited to: identity verification, Wagner Peyser registration, UI eligibility review and form completion, work search logs saved and uploaded in its workforce system, job readiness workshop referrals and provision of customized Labor Market Information for the claimant’s primary job family.
TWC’s first strategy was for staff to also work with claimants to develop a more strategic individual reemployment plan (IRP), built around measurable objectives and work search activities that become a regular part of the claimant’s benchmark review in subsequent RESEA meetings.
To enhance the experience and outcomes for claimants, the following set of required and meaningful reemployment services were added to the Initial RESEA Meeting:
- Reemployment Services Video – TWC assigns an engaging and informational video ahead of the initial RESEA meeting to ensure claimants understand TWC’s programs and variety of support services. Once claimants watch the entire video, a completion service code is automatically sent to the customer’s profile.
- Resume Check – Staff complete a five-point resume review with claimants and update their resume in the TWC system.
- Virtual Recruiter Referrals – TWC’s team sets their online job board to provide weekly job leads tailored to the claimant’s background, and claimants are advised to apply to at least one job per week
- Staff Job Referrals – Staff provide additional referrals to claimants and advise them to apply to each one
- Applications – Applying for virtual recruiter and staff job referrals are added as objectives to the claimant’s IRP to ensure meaningful work activities occur between meetings
To better serve claimants still struggling to land a job in later weeks of their unemployment, TWC tapped evidence-based research to design its Subsequent Meeting Pilots. Pilot Phase I rolled out in March 2024 with 12 Workforce Boards, and Pilot Phase II rolled out in April 2025 with an additional nine Boards providing expanded reemployment services in two subsequent meetings.
2. First Subsequent RESEA Meeting – Pilot Phase I and II services IRP Follow Up and Additional Services
IRP Follow Up
In the first subsequent meeting, staff began by completing standard federal checks (identity, eligibility review, LMI, WIOA eligibility) and follow up on each claimants’ IRP to confirm they’ve applied to one virtual recruiter and all staff-provided job referrals. Staff also:
- Refer claimants to one job fair and
- Assist claimants in completing one job application in the meeting
The nine Boards participating in Pilot Phase II leverage two additional leading technology tools for reemployment, provided by Skillful Communications Inc., in its subsequent RESEA meetings.
AI-Powered Resume Scan
The first assignment is an AI-driven resume scan assigned to claimants by their RESEA Employment Coach. Claimants are instructed to complete the assignment at home before their First Subsequent Meeting. Once they accept the invite, customers upload their resumes to the platform. Customers can elect to use a resume that is autogenerated from WorkInTexas.com or provide one of their own.
After uploading their resume, claimants input a job vacancy or job description of the type of job they are seeking. Big Interview’s proprietary AI model then scans the resume and automatically assigns it a gold, silver, or bronze medal based on metrics the AI model is trained to detect, including readability, credibility, formatting, and Applicant Tracking System (ATS) compatibility based on the specific job description or in-demand job skills. Customers must achieve a medal to receive completion credit for Big Interview Assignment One.
AI-Assisted Interview Preparation
The second assignment is completing practice interview training and recordings using the Big Interview (BI) platform. The training includes pre-recorded lessons created by expert career advisors. The interview practice sets are customizable by industry, experience level and question difficulty.
Frontline employment coaches assign a single practice set to the claimant who records their responses as though it was a real job interview. The claimant then receives customized AI-assisted feedback on their performance and specific to their occupation.
Finally, while they have each claimant’s attention, staff schedule each claimant’s second subsequent RESEA meeting.
3. Second Subsequent RESEA Meeting – Additional In-Person Interview Prep
In each claimant’s second subsequent RESEA meeting, staff complete all of the repeatable items in the prior RESEA meeting and track it as part of their IRP.
The second subsequent meeting must be in person where staff complete a mock interview with each claimant which enables personalized feedback from the RESEA counselor. Staff participating in Phase II use the Big Interview platform to complete these mock interviews.
TWC RESEA Results
TWC’s commitment to its RESEA program and continuous improvement utilizing innovative technology has been impressive. Through December, claimants had completed over 35,000 appointments in Phase I of the Subsequent Meetings Pilot and over 7,500 appointments in Phase II, with the following results:
- Claimants’ verified required work search actions included over 30,000 workforce system direct job referrals, over 28,000 completed job application services and over 36,000 job fair referrals.
- Subsequent meeting completion rates have been approximately 10% higher than initial RESEA appointments during the same period.
- Claimants completed 11 times more interview practice sets than required, suggesting customers find the large library of interview practice sets useful (See Appendix A details). This is a significant “Nudge Factor”.
- Despite TWC not requiring completion of Big Interview pre-recorded interview lessons, customers voluntarily completed over 15,000 lessons, nearly five times the number of assignments required in the system’s two assignments.
- TWC assignments have received positive feedback from staff and customers, with surveyed UI customers who used the Big Interview platform indicating:
- It improved my interview skills = 65%
- It improved my resume = 64%
- I would recommend it to another job seeker = 71%
- While the TWC initiatives do not have random-assigned control group study results, impacts in UI duration rates compared to the unemployment rate in Texas suggest a solid impact on length of unemployment. Since TWC began implementing its initiatives in RESEA, the Texas unemployment rate rose a relative 7.5% while UI claim duration in Texas rose only a relative 3.2%, less than half the unemployment rate change.
Summary
Texas’s RESEA initiatives have had a positive impact on claimant engagement and duration. While the subsequent meeting pilot and Big Interview assignments are still early in the evaluation process, TWC’s unique approach is providing compelling evidence that increased required activities leads to increased engagement within the RESEA program as well as UI claimant satisfaction and outcomes.
If you’re a state unemployment program executive and would like to explore how your program may benefit from the best practices of Texas and other states, contact Spencer Clark at spencerc@fullemployment.org
Appendix A
Details
1. RESEA Elements
2. TWC RESEA Nudge Factor – Work Search Activity Completed / Activity Required
| A | B | C | D | E | F |
| Months | Interviews Recorded | Watched Lessons | Overall Time Spent (mins) | Required & Completed BI1 | Required & Completed BI2 |
| May | 1,439 | 2,602 | 62 | 222 | 127 |
| June | 2,744 | 3,046 | 82,041 | 338 | 132 |
| July | 2,152 | 2,443 | 74,007 | 416 | 233 |
| August | 2,070 | 2,484 | 77,159 | 348 | 192 |
| September | 2,399 | 2,219 | 83,827 | 391 | 233 |
| October | 2,659 | 3,023 | 85,701 | 427 | 269 |
| Total | 13,463 | 15,817 | 402,797 | 2,142 | 1,186 |
Columns B – D represent metrics that illuminate the usage of the Big Interview platform by RESEA customers beyond the mandatory activities that make up BI1 and BI2 assignments, which are represented by Columns E & F.
Column C, “Watched Lessons”, refers to the curriculum of pre-recorded lessons created by expert career advisors specifically for Big Interview. None of these lessons are mandatory for RESEA customers, yet 15,817 lessons have been watched from May through October, a figure nearly 5x the combined BI1 and BI2 completions. This indicates that RESEA customers think this bonus content is interesting or helpful on their reemployment journey.
Column D, “Overall Time Spent”, refers to the amount of time that RESEA customers are actively logged in to the Big Interview platform. Conservatively assuming that BI1 and BI2 take a combined total of 60 minutes to complete, then RESEA customers are spending twice the amount of time on the platform than is required of them. This implies that the additional activities available beyond the mandatory Resume Scan and Interview Practice are of value to RESEA customers.