5.6 Profiling Job Seekers to Differentiate Support

300 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance

BOX 5.6

Profiling Job Seekers to Differentiate Support

An important part of social protection is the support that helps people get jobs. There may be different groups of focus: youth, as new entrants to the labor force; those (most often women) returning to the labor force after a period of caregiving; or people facing unemployment, especially those displaced from industries affected by structural changes that diminish demand for the whole sector. A special concern can be avoiding long-term spells of unemployment or withdrawal from the labor force as these can result in scarring, with lower chances of (re-)employment and/or lower wages.

Countries with well-developed, active labor market policies, usually those with predominantly formal labor markets, typically offer a range of supports of different intensities. This can range from self-service access to job listings; to job search assistance and coaching; to skills training in any or all of a variety of basic literacy and numeracy, vocational, or socioemotional skills; to wage subsidies or temporary public employment; to sheltered employment for people with severe trauma or disability; or some combination of these policies. Use of some of these services may be paired with or even a condition for income support via unemployment insurance or social assistance.

Matching the more intensive and costly of these services with the people who would be most likely to benefit from them is a targeting problem that is somewhat analogous to providing greater levels of income support to the relatively poor.a Profiling job seekers has the same problems of errors of exclusion (where a person who receives too few supports may not find employment) and inclusion (where a person who might easily find employment receives higher levels of support and uses more resources than needed).

There is a range of profiling techniques to try to make good matches between the risk of long-term unemployment and services to avoid that outcome. Some profiling methods rely more on simple rules (for example, on age or duration of unemployment or jobseeking spell), some rely more on the human skills and judgments of social workers, some rely on data and modeling to predict which job seekers will need the most supports, and some use a combination of these approaches. There is a literature on the pros and cons of these different methods that is akin to the choice of household-specific methods for assessing monetary welfare. The statistical profiling

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