Paris

Matching skills and jobs

Client: Pôle emploi, the public employment agency of France
Objective: To recommend a growth strategy
Team: Karolina Krzystek (Poland), Riccardo Mezzasalma (Italian), Anne-Sophie Michel (French), Roxanne Rua (French), Hanna Svae (Danish)

Pôle emploi, the French public employment agency, was created on 19 December 2008, following the merger of ANPE (Agence nationale pour l’emploi) and the network of ASSEDICs (Associations pour l'emploi dans l'industrie et le commerce), formerly the employment intermediary and unemployment benefits’ provider, respectively. Today, Pôle emploi employs 48,000 people and one of its main missions is to establish contacts between job seekers and enterprises on the French labour market in order to ensure the filling of the greatest possible number of vacancies.

Pôle emploi is faced with multiple challenges, such as a rising unemployment rate due to the economic crisis and internal transformation challenges linked with the merger. According to recent Eurostat statistics, the unemployment rate in France has grown constantly since June 2008, reaching 10.1% in March 2010. In addition to this, Pôle emploi needs to tackle the mismatch between the number of registered job seekers and collected job offers. As of May 2010, the number of job offers made available on Pôle emploi’s website amounted to less than 10% of registered jobseekers. It is therefore crucial for Pôle emploi to increase the services offered to client enterprises in order to: 1) collect more vacancies and thus help rebalance the gap between offer and demand on the French labour market, and 2) help companies find job seekers in sectors where many vacancies remain structurally unfilled.

Our research concentrated on Pôle emploi's service offer to small- and medium-sized enterprises, which have more limited human resource capabilities than larger firms and thus require a more targeted service offer. The study is intended to contribute to designing a strategy that would allow Pôle emploi to expand its existing service offer and to create a whole range of innovative services to better answer the expectations of its client enterprises.

To achieve this goal, we first conducted a thorough study of the range of services currently offered by Pôle emploi and analysed the needs and expectations of client enterprises. Following this first phase, where we mainly focused on Pôle emploi, we broadened the scope of analysis to examine the services offered by other public employment agencies in Europe and by private agencies in France. The first conclusions drawn from this benchmarking exercise were tested by means of interviews conducted with a range of stakeholders.

On the basis of our findings, we recommend that Pôle Emploi establishes an integrated approach towards the needs of client enterprises and develops its service offer throughout the whole human resource management cycle, including in the pre-recruitment and post-recruitment phases. Depending on the volume of resources available, we propose two alternative approaches to implement those recommendations.

The first approach aims at further developing some of Pôle emploi’s recent initiatives and at complementing them by a number of measures which would ensure the continuous improvement and deepening of Pôle Emploi's current service offer. While job seekers would remain the primary clients, this approach would allow Pôle emploi’s service offer to better suit the needs of its client enterprises, among others through the development of post-recruitment follow-up services, the simplification of administrative procedures for the employment of short-term contract workers, and the enhancement of sectoral and regional cooperation between enterprises, professional organisations and labour-market institutions in order to promote sustainable employability.

The second implementation scenario is based on a comprehensive reform strategy aimed at deepening as well as widening Pôle emploi’s service offer to enterprises. Pôle emploi could develop a whole range of innovative services covering the entirety of the human resource management cycle by creating an online idea bank on healthy working environments, offering an index to assess employees’ ability to perform their duties, developing a scheduling tool for temporary work services and providing enterprises in difficulty with specialised personal consultants.

Finally, the comparative study of the various measures developed by European public employment agencies in order to improve their service offer to enterprises has convinced us of the crucial role that the EU has to play in disseminating knowledge and in encouraging the exchange of best practices among those agencies.