Dáil Éireann debate -
Tuesday, 4 Feb 1997

Vol. 474 No. 3

Written Answers. - Recruitment of Staff.

Mary Harney

Question:

22 Miss Harney asked the Minister for Enterprise and Employment the proposals, if any, he has to counteract the growing difficulty faced by employers in recruiting staff, as revealed in a recent survey carried out by the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association. [2916/97]

Minister for Enterprise and Employment (Mr. R. Bruton)

The factors contributing to emerging recruitment difficulties are complex and diverse. They include record job creation in the three years to April 1996 during which period employment rose by 140,000. This trend is expected to continue this year; the pressure of demand in the availability of skills in certain areas; the apparent reluctance among some employers to recruit long-term unemployed persons; the wages and other conditions of employment on offer, especially at the lower levels, and the interaction between these and the tax and social welfare system. Initiatives in the recent budget will help in this regard. In addition, a range of measures has been introduced to ease the transition of unemployed persons into work, such as Jobstart, back-to-work allowance scheme, retention of secondary benefits, etc.

I have noted the findings of the recent survey by ISME and indeed by SFA. My officials will be meeting with both bodies to explore with them the lessons to be learnt from these studies and to develop appropriate policy responses. In particular, we would hope, with the co-operation of these organisations, to work with them in tracking in detail a control sample of vacancies so as to get more empirical evidence both of the particular difficulties being encountered by small employers in filling vacancies and of the reasons people are not apparently taking the jobs on offer.

The Government's strategy, in relation to employment policy, was outlined in the strategy paper —"Growing and Sharing our Employment"— which I published in April 1996. This strategy outlined the Government's twin goals — to maximise the creation of sustainable employment and to ensure that it is shared more equally throughout Irish society. As part of the strategy for improved access to jobs, several initiatives have been introduced and the Government has in place a range of responses to help meet the needs of the labour market.

The Jobstart programme provides a significant subsidy to employers — £80 per week to take on the very long-term unemployed; Budget 97 provided for an increase of 5,000 places under the back-to-work allowance scheme bringing the total number of places up to 22,000; 15,000 unemployed people were trained in 1996 in skills which employers demanded — close on 70 per cent of these people got jobs; there has been a significant improvement in the placement of long-term unemployed persons into jobs from community employment, as a result of the major development of the programme. A preliminary sample survey of participants who left the programme having completed their 12 months participation period indicated that 29 per cent had found full-time employment, 20 per cent had found part-time employment, 7 per cent were self-employed and 10 per cent had entered full-time education programmes or progressed to specific skills training programmes; since last November, FÁS and the Department of Social Welfare have been running a joint programme aimed at encouraging job search activities by persons aged 18-19 who are six months or more unemployed. There have been extensive promotion campaigns by FÁS to encourage employers to recruit apprentices in order to meet skill requirements which FÁS anticipate will be required in the future and FÁS has commissioned an independent professional survey of firms' employment needs and hard-to-fill vacancies; FÁS is participating in the on-going monitoring by Government and a number of other agencies of the supply-demand situation in a number of professional and high-tech occupations, and is considering options for dealing with any emerging imbalances; 55 new industry tailored training programmes were developed to meet strategic skills needs across the key sectors of the economy which were identified in sectoral studies and there has been a significant increase in vacancy handling at FÁS offices. In 1996, over 42,000 vacancies were notified to FÁS; in the Dublin regions, vacancies in 1996 were 37 per cent higher than in 1995. As part of the planned restructuring of FÁS, extra resources will be devoted to the placement service, which, combined with the resources available through the local employment services, will improve services to employers significantly.

It may be noted that many employers overseas have had to completely overhaul their recruitment and training strategies in relation to semi-skilled young workers. They have had to give more consideration to the type of career ladder which faces their operative level recruits, and, in particular, training approaches have become more systematic. Some of these employers have already begun to respond with FÁS and a number of joint traineeship type initiatives are under way. The development of a flexible national system of traineeships for semi-skilled jobs will be one of the most important trends over the next decade or so.