International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
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Table 7.14: Main channels used to find current or last job, by occupation, 2009
Main channel
used to find
current or last
job?
Manufacture
and
construction
blue-collar
workers
Services
bluecollar
workers
Personal
care
workers
Technicians
and
clerks
Professionals
Artisans
and
traders
Other Total
Relatives/
Friends
75.1 76.1 78.4 55.6 43.6 72.2 52.5 73.2
NGOs,
Catholic
Church, other
confessional
organizations
4.6 4.7 10.5 8.2 9.9 2.4 8.5 6.1
Trade unions 3.6 2.2 2.5 3.9 2.7 3.6 0.0 2.9
Private agencies
/ intermediaries
10.5 8.0 5.2 12.5 16.6 10.2 7.9 9.0
Newspapers /
Internet
2.1 5.4 1.9 10.7 6.5 1.6 11.9 3.5
Public
Employment
Office
2.5 1.5 0.9 3.7 5.6 1.2 0.7 1.9
other 0.8 0.6 0.4 4.2 12.1 3.5 7.1 1.7
without
intermediaries
0.8 1.5 0.1 1.1 2.9 5.2 11.4 1.6
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Note: This is table 4 in (Censis, 2010), p. 124. PER.LA data (year 2009). The table reports the share
of interviewees answering positively to each question.
Assessing the role of ethnic networks
The predominant role played by informal networks in the job search strategies of
immigrants is evident in all of the three data sources (LFS, ISMU and PER.LA) we
have considered in this section. In the case of immigrants, it is reasonable to expect
that informal networks are mainly ethnic networks. This is obviously the case for
relatives, but it is generally true also for friends and acquaintances who are very often
co-nationals of the immigrant.
Although hard to quantitatively document, ethnic networks clearly play a crucial
role in the matching process in Italy: ‘ethnic networks have been the main means
of communication and interaction between labour supply and demand: because of
weak public regulation, the function of networks as placement devices for immigrant
workers is important; the action of networks has produced Italy’s numerous ethnic
specializations, and can explain the different success rates among national migrant
groups’ (Ambrosini, 2011b).
Indeed, ethnic networks can clearly benefit immigrants by speeding up the process of
job search (Munshi, 2003) (Goel and Lang, 2009), but they can also constrain their
labour market access to the limited set of occupations where significant numbers of