In 2018, amendments to Section 306(c) of the Social Security Act (SSA) permanently authorized the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program and introduced substantive changes, including formula-based funding to states and a series of requirements intended to increase the use and availability of evidence-based reemployment interventions and strategies. The Department of Labor (DOL) provides funding to states to operate the RESEA program, which aims to help Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants return to work quickly and meet eligibility requirements.

The evaluation of the RESEA program includes four major components: 1) an implementation report; 2) a brief on serving UI claimants during the COVID-19 pandemic; 3) a brief report and collection of evidence briefs about RESEA program components, including selecting claimants and meeting attendance, basic career services, and individualized services; and 4) an options report for building evidence on RESEA programs.

This brief summarizes the state of the evidence for basic career services—a category of reemployment services—that help UI claimants return to work. The studies reviewed for this brief all estimated impacts on UI duration, and most estimated impacts on employment and/or earnings. Evaluations that examined employment and earnings rarely found statistically significant impacts of the receipt of basic career services. The brief describes the challenges to developing and using impact evidence of basic career services, available evidence on mandatory basic services, as well as evidence on basic services alone, and closes with a discussion of gaps in the current evidence base and implications of evaluating these kinds of RESEA program components.