Success Rate for Job Matching on MyCareersFuture.sg

12 Mr Desmond Choo asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what is the current successful job matching rate of MyCareersFuture.sg; (b) whether there are plans to introduce vernacular versions of the platform to help our older jobseekers; and (c) what are the plans to increase the job listings by smaller companies.

13 Mr Leon Perera asked the Minister for Manpower (a) whether an update can be provided on the job match success rate of the Jobs Bank for Singaporeans; and (b) what measures are being implemented to enable the measurement of job match success rates of the Jobs Bank and MyCareersFuture.sg for the purpose of assessing the returns on investment.

The Minister for Manpower (Mrs Josephine Teo): Workforce Singapore (WSG) helps match jobseekers with employers through the Adapt and Grow initiative.

Mr Speaker: Minister, are you taking Question Nos 12 and 13 together?

Mrs Josephine Teo: Yes, Sir, thank you for pointing it out. MyCareersFuture is one channel among several under Adapt and Grow. It is an online jobs marketplace that recently replaced the national Jobs Bank to help jobseekers and employers perform smarter and faster job searches.

The Jobs Bank had been well utilised, notwithstanding the many other options available to employers and jobseekers. In 2017, more than 20,000 employers placed job postings on the Jobs Bank, of which a small minority were to fulfil the Fair Consideration Framework advertising requirements. In other words, the employers used the platform for job postings even if they were not required to under the Fair Consideration Framework. In total, these job postings received more than two million applications from local jobseekers.

As employers may not update the outcome of their job postings, we are not yet able to capture all job matches facilitated by Jobs Bank or MyCareersFuture. We are, therefore, looking at ways to better assess the effectiveness of MyCareersFuture in job matching, such as inferring placement rates, using administrative data.

Small and medium enterprises accounted for more than 60% of job postings on the Jobs Bank in 2017. We expect the proportion to be similar in MyCareersFuture.

The MyCareersFuture platform is more useful to jobseekers by having the widest possible range of job postings. Employers, too, will prefer to post job openings on a platform that is accessed by more jobseekers. Therefore, instead of creating vernacular versions to cater to specific language users, our aim is to ensure ease-of-use of the platform for all users. We will continue to serve users who are more comfortable communicating in vernacular languages through Workforce Singapore's Careers Connect and the National Trades Union Congress' (NTUC's) Employment and Employability Institute as they have career centres dotted across the island. This includes providing guidance on online job searches so that these jobseekers, too, can eventually benefit from accessing opportunities through such avenues.

Mr Speaker: Mr Ang Hin Kee.

Mr Ang Hin Kee (Ang Mo Kio): Mr Speaker, I have a follow-up question for the Minister. Is the emphasis on success rate detracting the jobseeker from the fact that some of them may need to upgrade their skills, learn new skills, or are we paying too much attention on the ability of immediate matching, for example, they think "just because I list myself in the Jobs Bank, or I go to the Jobs Bank, I can therefore get a job"?

Sometimes, people may forget that you actually may need to go for different skills upgrading. Then that journey may take a longer time. So, are we paying too much attention on success rate and not putting enough focus on getting yourselves trained and upgraded to acquire a new skillset?

Mrs Josephine Teo: Mr Speaker, I thank the Member for his question. In fact, it is an excellent question. I can assure the Member that we do not just focus on getting job matches. I think the starting point is that, if we want to get the jobseekers matched with the employers, we have to, first, start with the consideration of the jobseekers' needs. So, if they are job-ready, skills-ready, what they want is an efficient way to find out who is hiring, what the employers are looking for, and what salaries are on offer.

Under those circumstances, MyCareersFuture.sg provides a channel which is free. It does not charge for any of the features, unlike private portals, which charge for certain features. It uses the latest in job-skills matching technology and points out, in fact, if the jobs come with Government schemes support, which no other portal will do.

The reason why we set up MyCareersFuture.sg is also because we know that, sometimes, some additional help is needed to match the employers' requirements by having a skills top-up. So, therefore, our portal makes this clear to the jobseeker: you want the job, you like it, you may not have everything that the employer is looking for, but there is help available. The portal will point this out, and then with a click through, the jobseeker can find out what help is available. So, that is what we do.

Of course, the jobseekers are free to approach the employers through the portal or through other means. For example, they follow up at networking events. That is why, quite often, they may secure the jobs without our knowledge. But that is also the case with other portals. So, we do not insist, right now, that either the employer or the jobseekers must close the loop and tell us that they have secured the job this way. Because if we insisted on that, we must ask if this inadvertently limits the number of jobs listed, or the number of jobseekers who use it. So, whilst we are interested, we want to find out if there has been a job match, we do not yet insist on it primarily because we understand that there are sometimes follow-through, follow-up that can be taken through other avenues.

Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Randolph Tan.

Assoc Prof Randolph Tan (Nominated Member): I just would like to ask for some further clarifications from the Minister about the fact that if you actually want something like MyCareersFuture to work, you need a systematic volume of participation. So, if we do not have certain metrics about how successful the system is, so how do you get that volume of participation? I am just asking this because I actually think it is a very good idea, but are there intermediate metrics other than the primary success rate?

Mrs Josephine Teo: Mr Speaker, yes. In response to the Member's question, the Member is quite right. The marketplace must be vibrant. There must be many users and there are two primary groups of users. One is the employers. We want to take a look at whether they are putting jobs up as listings and, for this, we also compare ourselves with other portals. I think we compare reasonably well. And I think what has been most encouraging is that although it started as a portal for you to post jobs for which the employer may potentially be hiring an Employment Pass holder for – to fulfil the advertising requirement under the Fair Consideration Framework – in fact, now, those kinds of job listings are a minority. So, 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.

The other metric that, of course, we track is the number of jobseekers who go online. Again, I think we compare quite well. I can share some of our Jobs Bank statistic for 2017. The total number of job postings is nearly a quarter million and the number of jobseekers, I think I mentioned, there were about two million applications. So that gives us a sense that it is quite an active marketplace. Our aim, of course, is to make it even more active and that we do so by improving the features making it even easier to use.

1.30 pm

Mr Speaker: Order. End of Question Time.

[Pursuant to Standing Order No 22(3), provided that Members had not asked for questions standing in their names to be postponed to a later Sitting day or withdrawn, written answers to questions not reached by the end of Question Time are reproduced in the Appendix.]