More Singaporean employers are turning to national online jobs marketplace to post their job openings. According to Manpower Minister Josephine Teo’s statement in Parliament on Tuesday (Jul 10), nearly 250,000 job advertisements from about 20,000 employers across the nation were placed on Jobs Bank last year.
The statement was made in response to questions in Parliament from Member of Parliament Desmond Choo and Non-Constituency Member of Parliament Leon Perera regarding the job-matching rate of the MyCareersFuture online jobs platform. Mr Choo also asked the job site will provide vernacular versions that will help older job seekers, as well as if there are plans to expand the job listings by small companies.
Formerly called Jobs Bank, MyCareersFuture was initially designed as a government jobs portal in 2013. It requires firms which are making which are making Employment Pass applications to advertise the job vacancy to Singaporeans first as priority. This is in order to comply with the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices. Owing to this, Mrs Teo said that such postings have become a small minority among its listing of job vacancies, Channel News Asia reports.
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She stated, “What this tells us is that the employers are finding it useful to post the other jobs which they are not required to do under the Fair Consideration Framework.”
Garnering more than 2 million applications from local jobseekers, Mrs Teo said that it has delivered ‘reasonably well’ performance compared to other job portals. However, as employers might not update the results of their job postings on the site, MOM has not yet been able to capture all job matches facilitated by Jobs Bank or MyCareersFuture, she added.
The ministry is working to find ways to better assess the effectiveness of MyCareersFuture in job matching, such as by inferring placement rates using administrative data.
More than 60 percent job openings placed on the Jobs Bank in 2017 were coming from small and medium enterprises (SMEs). MOM expects the proportion to be similar in MyCareersFuture, Mrs Teo said.
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