International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
96
Main actors
A variety of actors participate in the process of matching between demand and supply
of foreign workers in the Italian labour market. As we will analyse in more detail
in this section, informal channels (that is, personal networks, direct referrals, and
so on) dominate both employers’ and workers’ search strategies in Italy. Meanwhile,
public employment services play a role which is marginal at most. Private agents,
instead, are more relevant in this context: both for-profit firms – such as temporary
workers agencies – and non-profit bodies – such as NGOs, trade unions, the Catholic
Church and its related institutions, and so forth – do intervene in favouring the flows
of information between employers and candidates and in facilitating the matching.
Finally, ethnic networks seem to play a major role in the Italian context.
In this section, we look separately at the two main types of employers of immigrant
workers in Italy: firms and families.
General recruiting strategies
Italian employers tend to rely heavily on informal channels for their recruiting strategies.
Indeed, according to Excelsior survey data – an annual survey of about 100,000 Italian
firms run by the statistical office of the Italian Chambers of Commerce41 – more than
60 per cent of the firms interviewed used an informal channel (that is, direct knowledge
of the candidate; referral by other employees, acquaintance, customer or supplier, and
so on) as the main strategy for searching and recruiting personnel (Table 7.2). This
share decreases correspondingly with the size of the firm: it is around 66 per cent in
firms with one to nine employees (which are the vast majority in the Italian context),
but it falls to 10 per cent in (the few) firms with more than 500 employees. 42 It is larger
in manufacture and construction than in the services industry and substantially more
widespread in the South of Italy (69%) than in the North (55–56%). Although difficult
to quantify, one can expect that informal strategies are even more widely used in the
case of recruiting foreign-born workers. In fact, referrals from workers of the same
ethnic/national group may help entrepreneurs to bridge important information gaps
and communication difficulties that they would face if they tried to look for candidates
without any foreign intermediary. A similar conclusion can be reached when the
employers are families. The role of ethnic/national networks is further discussed in
Section 2.2.
In second place, we find that almost 25 per cent of the firms mainly use internal
databases of CVs and contacts of potential candidates. These databases are generally
obtained by collecting and organizing all CVs received by candidates, education and
41 The “Sistema Informativo Excelsior”, which is the statistical office of Unioncamere (the Italian
Chambers of Commerce), together with the Italian Ministry of Labour, runs this annual survey since
1997. A sample of about 100,000 firms with at least one employee are interviewed each year and asked
about their hirings in the past year and their planned hirings for the current year. The data from this
survey are available at: http://excelsior.unioncamere.net.
42 Italy has one of the lowest average numbers of employees per firm in Europe. In 2010, the figure was
at 4 employees per firm with respect to a EU27 average of 6.2. Below Italy are only Portugal (around
4) and Greece (3.3).