Long-term unemployed do not receive enough attention

02/06/2016

As public employment services often focus on those who just lost their jobs, the long-term unemployed face additional barriers as a consequence of limited resources.

In many European countries, long-term unemployed receive less employment-oriented services than those who just lost their job. Increasing the frequency of meetings and decreasing counsellors’ caseloads seems to be a cost-effective intervention for getting jobseekers back to work. More face-to-face meetings are conducive to a more personalised approach, which is needed to keep long-term unemployed persons’ job search motivation up, and to properly diagnose their barriers to work and devise services that address these.

This was the main message of the presentation of M. Csillag at the PES Network Conference on ‘Integration of the Long-Term Unemployed’ held on 2 June 2016, in Brussels. The objective of the conference was to discuss the implementation of the Council Recommendation on the integration of the long-term unemployed into the labour market. M. Csillag (together with M. Fertig) wrote one of the key background documents (Cost–benefit analysis of remedial interventions for the long-term unemployed) for the Council Recommendation.