She’d spend hours on the computer applying for jobs, but noticed after a few months that employers had stopped even inviting her in for interviews. It didn’t take long to become mired in depression, staying in bed and watching TV, wearing pajama bottoms for days on end.

“I would sleep all day long, and say, ‘Why should I look for a job? I’m just going to get the ‘Thanks but no thanks’ letter,” she told me.

But now, Jensen is working full time again, partly thanks to a program called Platform to Employment that was launched in Nevada last fall using federal funds. The program provides a selected group of long-term unemployed with an intensive five-week, job-readiness class, and then offers to cover up to two months of their salary for any employer willing to give them a trial. P2E was first launched with private funding in Connecticut in 2011 and has been piloted in 10 cities since then also using private funding.

Nevada is the first state to use federal funds to administer the program. Colorado and Indiana have also received the okay to use federal money, and in June, Connecticut’s legislature agreed to use $3.5 million in state funds to run the program for 500 residents.

“I believe everyone would benefit from a program like this. Most employers are looking at being out of work for six months as too long,” said Patricia Nelson, a career counselor at a state-funded JobConnect center in Nevada. She recently helped a client who had been out of work for a long time enroll in Platform to Employment. He got a full-time job soon after completing the program. Nelson and I spoke in the crowded JobConnect office, where dozens of clients lined up looking at postings on job boards, waiting to use the computers and phones to apply for positions.

They included Lajuana Jones, 32, who moved to Las Vegas from Colorado in early September and has yet to find a job. She has a silky voice, perfect for her career in customer-support, but she can’t find work.

“It’s pretty bad here,” she told me.

The long-term unemployed might have a particular challenge in a market like Nevada, where unemployment is still relatively high at 6.8 percent, but tens of thousands of people arrive every year from more expensive states like California, or colder ones such as Colorado, creating more competition for work.

Many of the long-term unemployed would benefit from Platform to Employment, but so far, it’s been limited in Nevada to one class with only 24 people in Las Vegas and a class 0f 26 in Reno.

The program is expensive to administer—about $6,000 a person. But it gets results. On average, the program has placed 80 percent of its participants, and 90 percent of those people were kept by employers after their trial period. No other workforce-training program has success rates like that.