International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
32
use of informal ethnic networks seems to be the most common recruitment practice
for migrant entrepreneurs directing small firms, who very often employ co-ethnics.
In Sweden, for example, the large majority of small- and medium-sized enterprises
that recruit from third countries are employers originating from those countries, who
use their personal networks in their countries of origin to identify recruits (Chapter
9). Similarly, according to the country study on the United States, immigrants own
a majority of the SMEs that hire migrant workers in the country. For instance, in
the leisure and hospitality industries, immigrants make up 47 per cent of hotel and
motel owners and 37 per cent of restaurant owners; in taxi service firms, 65 per
cent of owners, and in dry cleaning and laundry services, 54 per cent of owners, are
immigrants. Approximately half of the fuel service stations and grocery stores in the
country are owned by immigrants (Chapter 12). These immigrant SME employers
use well-established social networks that allow them to identify the skills they need
to hire migrant workers. Being migrants themselves, they are also familiar with
the legal and irregular channels of hiring migrant workers. It is also likely that, in
such cases, issues of cultural diversity and discrimination are not affecting migrants’
recruitment patterns.
Patterns of access to information on available migration candidates abroad to fill unmet
labour shortages also vary by sector. Indeed, each sector has specific characteristics
of labour demand and supply which are likely to shape the way in which the
employment matching occurs. Thus, across all firm sizes the recourse to the services of
intermediary agencies, both operating in the country where the firm has its premises
or from the migrants’ countries of origins, is more frequent for the recruitment of
qualified workers with technical skills in regulated professions – including in the
health sector – as those agencies generally also take care to verify the qualifications
held by the foreign candidate and of facilitating the recognition process. Greater
recourse to private intermediation services – both lawfully established and informal
– is also observed in the case of seasonal employment. In Sweden, for example,
where almost all seasonal workers from third countries come from Thailand, those
workers are recruited through a few Thai staffing agencies, with well-established
networks with Swedish berry-picking companies. Using Thai intermediary agencies
has the advantage of exempting berry pickers from having to pay Swedish social
security contributions. The services of private intermediary agencies are also often
sought for the temporary recruitment of highly skilled workers. However, as will
be discussed in section 2.2, online advertising, particularly through the websites of
higher-education institutions, seems to be the prevailing practice here.
Finally, consistently across the countries studied and with the relevant exception
of Germany, public employment services seem to play a marginal role for matching
employers with labour migrants, both in the case of foreign recruitment and in
the recruitment of resident migrants. More than the availability of tailored
services, it seems that a general issue of lack of trust between employers and
the public employment service, on the one hand, and between migrants and the
public employment service on the other, is responsible for this pattern. In Italy,
the Excelsior survey showed that only 3 per cent of Italian firms hire through