International Organization for Migration (IOM)

skills matching their labour needs. These may include: personal and professional
networks – including referrals from current employees, business partners or
competitors; employing private recruitment agencies and intermediaries; advertising
their job offers in the media, through the company’s website or through job banks;
participating in job fairs; and referring to the national public employment service or
to the list of job-seekers compiled by the national consulates abroad. The study has
shown that, in the current practice, big firms tend to use a wider range of information
channels for international employment matching and to have more frequent recourse
to formal intermediation channels, compared with SMEs, which in most cases and
with some relevant exceptions – notably in the case of seasonal vacancies – almost
exclusively rely on informal networks and personal referrals. The heavy reliance of
small firms on personal contacts in their foreign recruitment strategies exposes those
firms to risk of imperfect jobs-skills matching with negative consequences in terms
of productivity outcomes.
Against this background, policymakers in the EU Member States should support
the establishment and territorial diffusion – both inside the country and in the main
countries of origin of migrant flows – of non-profit initiatives, run in partnership with
local NGOs, aimed at connecting employers faced with difficult-to-fill job vacancies
with labour migration candidates. Good practices with this respect can be drawn
from Canada, where a plethora of immigrant serving organizations – often funded
at least in part by the federal or local authorities – does a good job in facilitating the
employment match between employers and migrants. Efforts would also be needed
in raising awareness of such initiatives among SMEs.
3. Assist SMEs and migrants in the use of Internet-based
migration and labour market information tools
In the past five to ten years, the sources of information on legal migration procedures
and on, respectively, available job opportunities and migration candidates to fill them,
have become increasingly widespread and user-friendly, largely as a consequence of
the application of the new information technologies. A proliferation of Internet tools
both for the awareness of the migration procedures and for job-matching – in the
form of job-bank portals – has been recorded.
However, on the demand side, big firms are clearly more able to make use of and
benefit from digital labour market information tools compared with their smaller
counterparts. The capacity of SMEs to fully navigate those websites to obtain
the specific information needed among a vast array of published material may be
somewhat limited by the typical resource constraints which affect small businesses,
including a lack of dedicated administrative staff. To reduce asymmetries between
big firms and SMEs in the use of digital labour market information tools, tailored
Internet resources targeting SMEs should be introduced. Good practices can again
be drawn from Canada, where the different government departments dealing with
labour migration issues have developed an extensive range of specific Internet tools
to support SMEs willing to hire migrants.
eXecutIve summAry – POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
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