For Italians word of mouth is essential for find work. The "informal" search channels - networks of friends, relatives or acquaintances - have placed 56% of employment in the last ten years: we are talking about 4,8 million places. 23% of employed people found work through friends or relatives, 9% through contacts established in the working environment. To say it is a research carried out by Inapp (National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies), presented during the 13th edition of the Labor Festival in Bologna.
Inapp, Sebastiano Fadda "Thus, significant distortions and loss of quality within the economic system"
“The prevalence of access to employment through informal channels now represents a structural feature of the Italian labor market – he underlined Sebastian Fadda, president ofInapp - with relevant distortions on the quality of human resource allocation. The data show that formal channels (apart from public competitions, we mainly refer to job centres) intermediate less paid job positions, mainly non-standard and characterized by low levels of education”.
"By effectively closing - he continued - the formal channels for finding work with public access to the best positions, the field of contestability is narrowed and the area of choice for the same employers is reduced, often compromising the valorisation of merit and the functioning of the so-called 'social elevator'. In the long run, all of this leads to an impoverishment of the share capital and, a loss of quality and efficiency of the entire economic system”, added the president of the Inapp.
Finding a job: self-candidacy is growing
From the Inapp dossier it can be seen that the search channel that has grown the most in the last ten years is self-candidacy, which has gone from 13% to 18%, probably also in relation to the evolution of social media. The employment generated by small private enterprises (1-5 and 6-10 employees), which represents 40% of the total private sector, passes consistently through informal intermediation (over 60%).
“Although only 2% of employed people declare that they have found work through apps or social networks – continues Fadda – however, digital intermediation, if not adequately regulated, risks further fueling informality. Suffice it to say that the 25% of employed people who in 2000 declared having used the Internet during the job search stage, to 50% in 2010, up to 75% in 2021”.
The role of public tenders is reduced, the use of job centers is growing
Among the formal channels, the role of the competitions (10% for those who have found work, seven percentage points less than ten years earlier), the effect of the reduction of the perimeter of the public sector and the blockage of turnover in the Public Administration. Furthermore, there is a growing (but still always lower than the main informal channels) recourse to private agencies and to the job center of educational and training institutions, a trend also due to their more recent institutionalisation.
In a labor market, it is observed, "exposed to complex recompositions and profound transitions, a public player is needed that adequately supports all the processes of allocation and reallocation of the workforce, as well as the people who struggle the most". Employment centers now mainly deal with weak users (32% have lower secondary schools) and manage to bring just over 4% of their pool to work. There remuneration of those who have found work thanks to employment centers is the figure for the quality of the opportunities that are conferred on them: 23.300 gross euros per year, against, for reference, the 35 of those who have won a public competition or the 32.600 who has found work in the professional environment.
It's not all. Also there share of graduates who have found work through the employment services is the lowest (23%) after that of temporary agencies (20%). Therefore, on the one hand there is a problem of lack of quality opportunities and on the other there is the burden of dealing with a particularly fragile user.
Fadda: "Strengthening job centres"
“For this – concluded the president of Inapp – there is a need for a plan to strengthen employment centres that goes beyond the limit of a mere numerical increase in personnel with radical interventions in terms of the clarity of the functions to be performed, the skills of the employees and organizational efficiency. For an overall improvement in the functioning of the labor market, employment centers must also be strengthened in their interconnection with businesses, guidance services, training services, other bodies operating in intermediation and with all the other tools and subjects of labor policies. In other words, employment centers must be given an active role in the labor market and offer the conditions to be able to play it”, concluded Fadda.
