Appointment of Foreign Job Placement Agencies by Workforce Singapore

Mr Pritam Singh asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what is the rationale for Workforce Singapore to appoint foreign job placement agencies instead of local agencies with an established presence in Singapore to help local PMETs find jobs; (b) what is the projected number of job placements to be found through the two agencies at the end of the two-year pilot scheme; and (c) what is the projected cost of outsourcing job placements to the two foreign agencies over the pilot phase.

To keep strengthening employment support for our local jobseekers, Workforce Singapore (WSG) adopts a multi-provider approach to help them. It runs three career centres, complemented by two more centres operated by the National Trades Union Congress-Employment and Employability Institute. In addition, WSG and its predecessor, Workforce Development Agency (WDA), had tapped on private sector employment agencies to provide wider employment outreach for our jobseekers.

As unemployment has generally been low, placements done by most employment agencies here have involved mainly passive jobseekers, that is, persons already in employment who may not be actively searching for jobs. To step up our support for active jobseekers who are unemployed and actively looking for jobs, we did a global search of employment agencies with the business model, experience and expertise suited to help such active jobseekers. We found that partnerships between the government and the private sector have been successful in countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, where private placement providers are contracted to place active jobseekers, including those who may face greater employment barriers. Hence, WSG appointed two of them as our partners so that we can adapt some of their best practices in Singapore for the benefit of our active jobseekers.

The two placement providers in the current pilot commenced operations six and eight months ago. Currently, they are still ramping up their operations and have yet to reach steady state. The payment they will receive from WSG will mainly depend on how many jobseekers they are able to place, taking into account the profile of the jobseekers, including age and length of unemployment.