Looking for face-to-face help with NJ unemployment? Now you can do it yourself.

Residents still experiencing issues with unemployment claims can now decide for themselves if an in-person appointment will help with their problems.

The Department of Labor is allowing claimants to self-schedule appointments at 12 One-Stop Career Centers throughout the state.

Those centers handle about 1,740 appointments per week. They are open from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on weekdays for half-hour appointments, said department spokesperson Angela Delli Santi.

The One-Stop Career Centers are in the following municipalities:

• Atlantic County: Pleasantville
• Bergen County: Hackensack
• Camden County: Cherry Hill
• Essex County: East Orange and Newark
• Hudson County: Jersey City
• Mercer County: Trenton
• Middlesex County: Perth Amboy
• Monmouth County: Neptune
• Passaic County: Paterson and Passaic
• Union County: Elizabeth

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There are still some exceptions as to who can make an appointment, though. Claimants who have filed appeals must wait for their hearing date, and identity verification must be done before an appointment. Those issues cannot be resolved in person, Delli Santi said.

The department first started offering in-person appointments in March, and Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo thought that the best way to do so would be to make those early appointments available to “claimants who had been waiting the longest to resolve their outstanding issues,” Delli Santi said.

“We started by calling every claimant with an outstanding claim issue and asking if they would like to schedule an in-person appointment with an agent,” she said.

And then earlier this month, the department opened the process for claimants to make their own appointments. There have been 24,214 appointments scheduled since March, including 6,244 that have been self-scheduled this month, Delli Santi said. 

Sen. Fred Madden, D-Gloucester, serves as the chairman for the Senate Labor Committee. He called this a "good step in the right direction,"

“After witnessing the devastating impact of the ongoing pandemic on unemployment, it is pivotal that residents receive the adequate assistance needed to combat these effects," he said. "Allowing residents to retain the control over when they may be available to discuss unemployment matters is crucial to the success of issuing sufficient benefits.”

His colleague across the aisle, Sen. Kristin Corrado, R-Passaic, still thinks that the department needs to do more though.

“This is a first step, giving people a chance to set up a meeting, but from what my office is hearing, constituents are struggling to get appointments," she said. "The process is complicated and confusing, and they can’t reach the end goal of setting up a face-to-face appointment with Department of Labor employees."

Delli Santi said the process was in development for months, because while the online system “remains the most efficient way to file for benefits,” the department understands that some claimants don’t have the “technology, or the internet access or the skills, to navigate the system without assistance from one of our agents.”

Here’s how it works for claimants:

• Go to myunemployment.nj.gov and click “check claim status.”
• Sign in to your account.
• Select “schedule appointment online.”
• Select “UI In-Person, 30 minutes.”
• Select the One-Stop office from the map where you would like your appointment to be. 
• Select the date and time that is convenient for you.
• Complete the applicant information and click "submit."
• A screen will appear confirming your appointment.

Delli Santi said the goal of the in-person appointments is to “resolve as many claims issues as possible on the spot.” Although not every issue can be resolved, the appointments help speed the process, she said.

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New Jersey was picked late last year as one of two states for a pilot project designed to make the unemployment system easier and more accessible to use. The goal of the pilot is to design an unemployment application system that “provides equitable and timely access to unemployment benefits for eligible workers, while rooting out identity theft and sophisticated fraud rings that have bogged down state systems throughout the pandemic.”

Earlier this year, the state Senate passed a resolution urging Gov. Phil Murphy to immediately address the unemployment claim backlog and reopen state offices to the public.

That resolution, co-sponsored by all of the senators present from both parties, noted that the continued closure of the career centers “may result in further economic harm to the unemployed individual and on a larger scale, the state of New Jersey.”

It also called for the department to provide, within 30 days, a report on unemployment statistics, including the number of people waiting for claims, the average length of time it takes for a claim to be completed, how much has been paid in claims, the number of employees working on claims, the average time each employee spends on a claim and anything else the department thinks is relevant.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, New Jersey had an unemployment rate of 3.9% as of June. That is just slightly higher than the national rate of 3.6%.