Proceedings of 8th European Assembly on telework (Telework2001)

163Table 1:Online work exchange market sizeCountry Austria Switzerland Germany U.K.Total no. <strong>of</strong> work exchanges 36 39 283 199job <strong>of</strong>ferings without PES 35,237 22,799 697,915 399,403job <strong>of</strong>ferings in PES only 18,263 12,159 467,820 373,750Data Source: empirica survey (see Gareis and Mentrup 2001a)We also found that today, most <strong>of</strong> the work exchanges in operation confine themselves to only onesegment <strong>of</strong> the labour market process, namely the matching between supply <strong>of</strong> and demand forworkers (see Figure 2). They supplement traditional media platforms for advertising job <strong>of</strong>feringsand also in part for the services <strong>of</strong> the Public Employment Services (PES), which themselves arealso operating work exchanges. Gains in efficiency that result from using online work exchangesinstead <strong>of</strong> traditional media (e.g. newspaper ads) are likely to benefit in particular workers whoalready hold jobs and therefore are willing to invest only very limited amounts <strong>of</strong> time for jobseekingactivities. Through the use <strong>of</strong> passive search techniques such as simple, semi-autonomousagents that rely on active solicitation <strong>of</strong> user input, users can participate on the open labour market(i.e. present their CVs to prospective recruiters) with very little effort required.Figure 2:Generic Labour Market Process Model and Field <strong>of</strong> Activity <strong>of</strong> Most Online WorkExchanges