Chris McCall was getting ready for the birth of his seconddaughter in 2013 when the unexpected hit: He was let go after fouryears at agencyQ, a digital marketing company in Washington.

After a couple of months of looking for a job, and caring for aninfant and her two-year-old sister, McCall and his wife, Rebecca,decided he would be a stay-at-home dad. His wife would earn thefamily paycheck.

A third daughter came in 2015, and McCall, 39, started to worryabout his ability to get back into the job market. When he applied,he encountered an obstacle familiar to many workers: a bias againstolder employees and people with resume gaps.

“I applied to several positions where I was over-qualified anddidn’t feel like I got that much consideration,” he says. Whilesome companies understood his child-care hiatus, for others “it wasanother black mark against me,” he says.

For all the lip service companies give to family-oriented policies and non-discriminatoryhiring, economists find evidence of age bias. People who voluntarily step out ofthe labor market don’t fare well, either.

That might be changing. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen hasallowed the labor market to undershoot the jobless rate that thecentral bank says is consistent with full employment. It was agamble that the economy would pull in labor from the margins,putting more people to work without stoking unwanted inflation. Thestrategy is working on both counts.

Experienced workers

Ford Motor Co., Barclays Plc and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. arejust some of the companies now targeting workers with previousexperience who for various reasons have been outside the laborforce.

Some of these hires come at a bargain. A paper by three Fedresearchers and one at Columbia University shows detached workerscan cost about 25 percent less than if a firm tried to poach asimilar employee from another company.

“It makes sense for firms to go after non-participants,” asthey are less likely to set off wage-bidding by seekingcounteroffers, says Aysegul Sahin of the New York Fed, one of thepaper’s co-authors.

To the surprise of some firms, the quality of applicants is alsohigh. “This is a tremendous pool of talent,” said Barbara Byrne,the New York-based vice chairman of investment banking at Barclays,which this year has received 870 applications for 26 spots inits Encore program aimed at returning workers. “The workplace needsthese people to come back in.”

So does the U.S. economy.

Growth hinges on labor supply, which is rising at a slower paceas baby boomers -- the generation born between 1946 and 1964 --retire.

Back-to-work programs could also heal a disturbingpost-recession scar. A significant number of men and women left thelabor force and didn’t come back.

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Prime age

Some 91.5 percent of men -- and 75.6 percent of women -- 25 to54 years old, or prime working age, were working or looking for ajob at the start of 2007.

Today those numbers are 74.9 percent for women and just 88.5percent for men, a number Dartmouth College economist and formerYellen adviser Andrew Levin calls “an urgent public policyproblem.”

Theories about what happened to the so-called missing men rangefrom opioid addiction to the loss of middle-skill jobs astechnology and automation infuse into more tasks.

But McCall’s experiences suggest that bias is also at work. Somemanagers who suspect it’s there are intent on quashing it.

“My objective is that we shatter stereotypes about gaps inservice,” said Holly Rollins, a Colorado-based director ofcybersecurity at Booz Allen Hamilton who initiated the firm’sre-engagement program.

Rebecca McCall spotted the program at Booz Allen, where she alsoworks, and told her husband about it. Booz Allen hiring managersembraced the child-care gap, Chris McCall said. His skills werestill sharp, and, after a brief internship, he was hired in June2016, in a unit separate from Rebecca’s.

“I was happy to get back in the labor force,” he said.

Tight markets

Rollins said she didn’t sell the idea to senior managementsolely as a diversity concept that would benefit women, even thoughreturning stay-at-home mothers are big beneficiaries of suchprograms.

“We are in very, very tight labor markets,” Rollins said.Reaching out to disengaged, qualified people is “another solutionin the toolbox” to meet hiring needs.

Many companies work with Carol Fishman Cohen and her companyiRelaunch, which now consults with about 30 large firms --including International Business Machines Corp. and Morgan Stanley-- on implementation. (Bloomberg LP has occasionally consulted withiRelaunch on programs supporting returning women.)

Cohen, who like Byrne is a mother of four, restarted her careerat Bain Capital after an 11-year child-care break.

Low unemployment may be one reason for the rising popularity ofthe programs, Cohen says. Another is the “caliber of thecandidates” participating in so-called returnships, she says.

Ann Haener-Maghran, 55, started working at Ford as an autointerior engineer this year, after about a 20-year absence from thelabor force. She completed a six-month internship in themanufacturer’s return-to-work program that began this year.

Employees such as Haener-Maghran, who has an engineering degreeand an MBA, “have an abundance of professional experience and areexcited to get back to work,” said Meeta Huggins, Ford’s chiefdiversity officer. “Why not leverage this talent pool?”