Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced in budget 2009-’10 that India will have a centralized portal using which any job seeker can access the employment exchange of any city and can apply for the job. This project will be carried in public-private partnership which will collaborate to develop a national portal with common software to provide similar interface across various employment exchanges.
Will it really benefit its target audience?
Employment exchanges have been in existence for long and certain employment exchanges (eg. Delhi Employment exchange) are online for more than 5 years but none of them have considerable number of employers. Most of job seekers registered with employment exchanges are either searching for jobs in Government sectors or related to teaching, nursing, ITI or are unskilled labor. In Delhi employment exchange around 32 thousands job seekers posted resume for teaching jobs, around 30 thousand for ITI, drivers and more than 1.5 lakh are under-graduates.
This shows that government employment exchanges mainly cater to unskilled labour which wont be able to use online employment exchange functionality. Besides this the process of posting their resume for majority of the audience of employment exchanges which are under-graduates will be cumbersome as most of them are not even computer literate. So there is no impact of this online exchange.
What can be done to make Online Employment exchanges more productive and practical?
As mentioned before more than 70% job seekers are unskilled labor so making online portal will mostly benefit employers so that they can search and contact the job seekers promptly.
I went through the employment portals of various states like Delhi, J & K, Himachal and most of them lack functionality where an employer can quickly search for a job seeker and contact him/her. Even here things work like most Government departments, slow and ineffective. Any employer can’t wait for months before hiring a person making most of the employment exchanges useless.
Hence, the Government needs to give it a second thought to make these employment exchanges more effective otherwise they will be a mere repository of job seekers’ data with no real use.
