As Government ‘Any Job First Scheme’ is Criticised for Failing Job Seekers a New Survey Shows Vast Majority Want Government to Work with Commercial Organisations to Improve Service

The leading Recruitment and Employment Technology Company, CareerWallet has recently published an extensive global workplace survey to give a true overview of working life globally and how the jobs market is being impacted by political and economic factors, technology and industry changes.

Following criticism of the UK Government’s ‘Any Job First Scheme’ the extensive report has highlighted that over half of job seekers (53%) admit that they don’t believe the government has offered any support in helping them find a new job. Due to this lack of support, the vast majority (87%) believe the Government should work with commercial organisations to improve their service.

Most job seekers (52%) are still using job sites and aggregators to look for their next role, making it the most popular way to find a job. This was followed by job seekers applying directly on company websites (28%), using recruitment agencies (23%) and word of mouth (22%).

Only 1 in 5 job seekers admitted they had used the government job site or job centres to find a new job and less than a fifth found either of these useful and only 13% of all job seekers believe the government does enough to support job seekers. Many believe the outdated services cannot compete with the commercial organisations that offer advanced job searching and a much wider selection of jobs than the government website.

For example, a recent report showed nearly 20,000 live and unique cleaning jobs available in the UK and the government jobsite listed only a little over 4,000 of these. This is just one example of roles in a relevant sector that are simply being overlooked or ignored by government officials and the report highlights that thousands of roles in other sectors are not being accessed either.

Craig Bines, CEO of The CareerWallet Group, commented, “It is no surprise to see that the vast majority of job seekers are disgruntled with the support they get from governments, especially as their outdated solutions have been widely criticised. These outdated and poorly managed services don’t give any additional value to people looking for work.

It is also interesting to see so many job seekers asking why the government don’t work with a commercial organisation such as CareerWallet to improve their offering. As a market-leading aggregator, we are perfectly positioned to enhance their service.

By working with the private sector and aggregating all relevant roles the government could easily fix this issue and offer a comprehensive service across the nation.”