Job portals displaying countless job opportunities have gone viral on the internet across the world, thus making job search and inquiry as easy as possible. But with this huge amount of information provided on the portals, it is difficult for job seekers to find the information they need about a certain job. The job-seeking process requires several steps, including defining your search preferences to find the right job and surfing many websites to learn about training courses, certificates, and related policies. All this leads to one conclusion: job searching is a lengthy and time-consuming process.
In an attempt to address this challenge, the Korea Employment Information Service (KEIS) has launched The Work, a service that helps job seekers by providing recommendations on suitable jobs without the need for individual searches. Users of this platform simply need to log in to the public jobs portal Work-Net to receive six job recommendations according to their qualifications and experience. This service is the first public portal supervised by a member state of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to offer such comprehensive information on a daily basis. These recommendations are reached using artificial intelligence that analyzes the CVs of job seekers registered on Work-Net, as well as past experiences and training experience, any grants they had received, and their areas of interest.
The Work aims at reducing the time needed to look for the right job and realizing social value by supporting the employment of various groups of society, including middle-aged people and women who had to take breaks for a certain period of time and wish to resume their careers. Moreover, the service seeks to create data-based public services by boosting the use of public data.
Many job seekers, including university graduates, women who had stopped working, and middle-aged people, have benefited from the recommendations and succeeded in finding a suitable job through this innovative service, which eliminates the need to engage in boring and difficult job searches. Users can easily access The Work since it is conveniently featured on the home screen of Work-Net without having to navigate complex menus. The service has significantly reduced the time needed to view information about a job post. Job seekers used to access various sites to obtain the necessary information about the job, training courses, certificates, and related policies. They can now complete this task in an easier and faster way through The Work, which collects and organizes information into six major job-related areas, and then presents its recommendations.
The Work gathers information from the National Job Information Platform, which stores massive amounts of job information. The government of Korea launched this data innovation platform to improve the employment of public data by collecting job-related information. The data displayed on the platform includes information about job vacancies, training courses, job insurance, and certificates, which were previously scattered among various public administration systems. Furthermore, the platform helps in the creation of job opportunities that are suitable for job candidates. Its importance also stems from the fact that it is the product of collaboration between different entities and draws on data from the KEIS and its partners.
The National Job Information Platform uses machine learning technology to gather and analyze the competencies of job seekers and those required by companies. A new Job Competency-based Matching System will be launched this year, which is not limited to passive job recommendations and acts as a bridge between job seekers and companies.
KEIS engages in the following three efforts to enhance The Work.
1) Analyzing the degree of utilization and the accuracy of recommended information by processing the Work-Net log. Some of the items currently being analyzed are the degree to which users view the recommended information and the extent to which this information helps users to actually apply for jobs.
2) Algorithms are currently being developed to recommend job seekers to businesses looking for candidates. The goal of this service is to recommend suitable candidates to businesses looking to hire new employees.
3) Analyzing employment insurance data to monitor the degree to which job seekers are successfully finding employment at the recommended companies, in addition to the retainment level after being appointed. Algorithms are also being developed to recommend jobs with high employee retention rates.
The Work's success depends on the amount and quality of data available on the National Job Information Platform for AI and big data analysis. To ensure data volume and quality, the platform's mission was not initially limited to pulling data from the KEIS, but from other entities as well working under the umbrella of the Ministry of Employment and Labor. However, this data was not sufficient to provide job seekers with the right information. This required attempts to obtain data from other entities, such as government ministries, government agencies, and others, but there were no legal grounds for providing such information. To overcome this challenge, the KEIS and the Ministry of Employment and Labor proposed amending the Framework Act on Employment Policy to allow data provision by external entities. The amendment was signed and implemented in April 2019, allowing for external data to be included in The Work system.
Since its launch in December 2018 and until November 2019, The Work helped around 7,600 individuals find a job that matches their qualifications. This figure was reached by tracking the number of job seekers who applied for jobs within the companies recommended by The Work. They were hired and were covered by employment insurance. An analysis conducted in this regard showed that The Work users who succeeded in finding a job ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties. Another analysis revealed that job seekers used to spend an average of 10 minutes searching for the right job information across different websites and that The Work provided the same information within five seconds of log-in. In short, the service successfully reduced the needed time to search for a job to approximately 1/120.
The Work experience can be replicated and leveraged inside and outside Korea. The data of the National Job Information Platform will soon be available through the jobs portal network that targets the Korean private sector, thus allowing the sector to provide high-quality job services similar to those provided by The Work. The KEIS is currently participating in the implementation of computerized employment service networks in Asian countries, such as Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cambodia through international cooperation programs. The Work has been a topic of interest for many of these countries. The service is expected to continue its contributions and become a role model in government employment services around the world.
Resources:
https://www.work.go.kr/useInvite/worknetHomepgInvite/worknetIntro.do
