Effectiveness of Jobs Bank in Getting Employers to Give Fair Consideration to Local Job Applicants

Mr Zainal Sapari asked the Minister for Manpower (a) in the last three years, how many employers hired locals instead of employment pass holders after advertising through the Jobs Bank; (b) how does the Ministry monitor the effectiveness of the Jobs Bank in terms of (i) helping Singaporeans make informed career choices (ii) pointing employers to suitable local talent; and (c) whether the Ministry has taken any further action against employers who advertise in the Jobs Bank without giving fair consideration to local job applicants.

To find suitable candidates, employers advertise job openings through a variety of channels, including print advertisements, online job portals and recruitment agencies. Likewise, jobseekers may apply to jobs advertised through multiple channels. It is therefore unlikely that an employer or jobseeker relies on any single portal, including MyCareersFuture.sg.

MOM and Workforce Singapore's (WSG) efforts to help Singaporeans to find jobs also go beyond MyCareersFuture.sg. Under the Adapt & Grow (A&G) initiative, WSG and NTUC's Employment and Employability Institute (NTUC's e2i) offer a suite of career matching services including career coaching, employability workshops, job fairs and job matching through their career centres. Together with MyCareersFuture.sg, our career coaches help jobseekers to make informed career choices.

There are also programmes that help jobseekers overcome mismatches in skills, wages or job expectations. For example, there are over a hundred Professional Conversion Programmes (PCPs) providing wage and training support for employers to re-train workers to take up new jobs or careers. The Career Support Programme (CSP) encourages employers to give opportunities to mature retrenched or long-term unemployed PMETs by providing wage support for a period of time.

Through A&G programmes and services, we helped about 30,000 Singaporean jobseekers find new jobs in 2018. In the first half of 2019, we helped about 18,000 jobseekers secure jobs, about 9% more than in the same period last year. MyCareersFuture.sg contributes to these placement results. Neither employers nor jobseekers are obliged to inform WSG of the outcomes of their job postings or searches. However, since it was launched in April 2018, its monthly visitorship has risen from about 214,000 in April 2018 to about 511,000 in June 2019. As a gauge of the portal’s attractiveness to employers, fewer than 20% of the job postings were to fulfil the Fair Consideration Framework (FCF)'s advertising requirement. This suggests that employers are coming on board MyCareersFuture.sg voluntarily because they find value in doing so.

Under the FCF, MOM takes action against employers with unfair hiring practices, including those that place job advertisements without fairly considering applicants. For instance, we have withdrawn work pass privileges from employers that pre-selected foreign applicants and went through the motions of advertising on the Jobs Bank without applying their evaluation criteria consistently across all candidates. We investigate cases where employers are suspected to have such practices and will not hesitate to sanction them.