Even in the best economic times, it’s hard for people who have left the workforce to get back in.

But with the unemployment rate near record lows in the Bay Area — it’s 2.5 percent or below in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties — some employers are reaching out to people who have exited the labor market to care for kids or other family members.

Bank of America is hosting a “workforce re-engagement workshop” in San Francisco on May 23, its first event on the West Coast for returning talent.

A small but growing number of companies are offering “returnships,” which are internships for people who’ve been out of work for at least one or two years. Most are for mid-career professionals in hard-to-fill positions. Apple will start a 17-week return-to-work program for engineers with at least five years’ experience on April 15. (Registration is closed.)

Abby Carrales worked as a programmer analyst at UCSF for nine years but left in 2014 after having her third child. In 2016, she did a coding boot camp and thought she’d bounce back into the workforce. It took her two years to find a job.

“I would get into interviews. It would always come down to myself and another candidate,” she said. When employers see a gap in a resume, they assume the person “has left to have children and that their career would always play second fiddle to their primary caregiver responsibility.”

Carrales said she was asked in interviews about her age, her children’s ages and whether she planned to have more children. Thinking her Latina surname might be hurting her chances, she tried using her husband’s Irish name, but that didn’t help.

In 2018, she saw a returnship advertised on Cloudflare’s website and applied.

Returnships are similar to college internships but don’t run in the summer. They are full-time, paid positions that usually last 12 to 16 weeks. At the end of the term, the intern may or may not be offered a permanent job. A cohort of interns typically enter the program together and often attend workshops on job skills and transition to work. Many are run in partnership with outside companies or nonprofits.

Carreles was accepted into Cloudflare’s 16-week program in September. Two months later, she was hired into a permanent position as a security compliance specialist.

Cloudflare, a San Francisco internet security company, works with Path Forward, a nonprofit in New York that helps companies set up returnships. Its Bay Area partners include Walmart Labs, Intuit, Paypal and SAP SuccessFactors.

“The program has been a really great source of talent for us,” said Janet Van Huysse, Cloudflare’s head of people. All seven people who went through its programs were hired permanently, and six more are doing a returnship now.

Companies are facing the “twin pressures” of low unemployment and wanting to diversify their technical ranks, said Tami Forman, executive director of Path Forward. Returnships can help with both because most returnees are women.

Forman said top executives see the value in these programs. “Instead of poaching (employees) from the guy down the street and paying 25 to 30 percent more,” they can hire someone who’s been out of work.

The hard part is persuading hiring managers to take a risk. If they make a bad hire, it makes them look bad. “Doing what they’ve always done seems safer than taking a chance,” she said. Her program includes training for hiring managers on tech testing and interview techniques, such as, “Don’t expect a woman to say ‘I’m a rock star.’ The guy who says he’s a rock star probably isn’t,” Forman said.

Lynsey Reys-Nickel worked at Stanford University for seven years managing medical training and earth science programs. She took off work for 4½ years to care for a child and then for her husband, who had heart surgery at age 40.

During this period, she got a doctorate in career education and training. She already had a master’s in higher education administration and an MBA but, when she went looking for a job in 2017, found that wasn’t enough. “Silicon Valley is extremely hypercompetitive,” she said. She often found herself competing with candidates who had been referred by their mother or brother.

“You are sending the application to a recruiter who may not have the skills or training to understand the break in paid employment,” she said. In many cases she couldn’t get past the artificial intelligence some companies use for screening applicants. “The hardship was getting that initial phone screening with a real person to tell my story.”

After a year of job hunting, she landed a returnship at DataStax, a cloud database company in Santa Clara. Four months into the program, her position was converted to a permanent role in human resources.

Goldman Sachs offered the first returnship program in 2008 and trademarked the name, but it’s often used generically, said Carol Fishman Cohen, co-founder of iRelaunch, a for-profit company that helps companies set up re-entry programs. Many Wall Street companies offered similar programs, with different names.

In 2015, iRelaunch partnered with the Society of Women Engineers to form the Stem Re-entry Task Force and promote returnships for tech jobs. Almost 400 people have gone through the task force’s programs, Cohen said.

As well, iRelaunch hosts conferences where people looking to re-enter the workforce can get job advice and connect with sponsor companies. The next one is May 7 at Stanford, but it costs $240 to attend. Sponsors include Apple, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and LinkedIn.

About 50 U.S. companies now offer returnship programs, Cohen said. Those that report data say they are hiring 50 to 100 percent of interns into permanent positions.

The fact that some companies “have had to start inducing people to come back to work ... is consistent with the theory that labor is finally getting a little bit scarce,” said Josh Bivens, research director with the Economic Policy Institute.

But it’s still not easy for people to re-enter the workforce, said Stacey Delo, who runs a company called Après that offers online job listings and classes for returners. “It’s one thing to say you are going to hire women on the sidelines, it’s another thing to train your hiring managers to interview without bias toward the gap.”

Après charges job seekers $99 a year and companies a “partner rate,” said Delo, who lives in San Francisco though her company’s in New York. Companies that have advertised jobs on its site include Fitch, Navigant, Metlife, Facebook and Mastercard.

Bank of America’s free workshop next month is for people who have been out of work at least a year and meet certain prior job criteria. They can’t be former employees of the bank. The registration deadline is April 19.

The event will “offer tips around technology, self-branding, resume writing, interview techniques and how to build a network.” said Gioia McCarthy, the bank’s San Francisco market president. “I want there not to be a barrier or stigma when there is a gap on a resume.” There will be recruiters at the workshop, “but I don’t want anyone to feel like it’s a hard sell,” she added.

Bank of America has had similar events on the East Coast, but McCarthy said she was inspired in part by her colleague Ann Thompson, who took a 12-year break from banking to raise children. When Thompson came back to work in 2002, she had to deal with a lot of technology that didn’t exist in 1990. “I was intimidated, but it made things much more efficient,” she said.

Communicating with clients by cell phone at any hour of the day or week “made it easier to get work done,” said Thompson, who heads Bank of America’s consumer lending and sales in the West.

The most important job for women returning to work “is getting your family behind you. There’s going to be a lot of change for your partner or spouse if you have one,” she said. Another is realizing that whoever takes over the cooking, cleaning and homework monitoring will never do it the same or as well as you did.

Finally, make time to sustain friendships.

“I was working 60 hours a week,” Thompson said. “You have to consciously take time for partner, spouse, children and somehow figure in those friends too.”

Editor’s note: This column has been updated with Carol Fishman Cohen’s full name.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender