I just watched this MOT episode on Areena, and the link above is the related story on Yle’s website.
I’ve been thinking about changing jobs for over a year now and have been submitting applications through Työmarkkinatori (Job Market Finland) as well. I’ve often used search criteria that only show jobs posted within the last week. Apparently, they don’t have a system like the one on Tori.fi, for example, where you can’t just keep bumping up ads to maximize visibility. The program shed some light on why these are being bumped. Every single job advertisement is recorded in statistics as an open vacancy. Thus, if an ad is republished every Monday over 12 weeks, instead of one job that is actually (maybe actually, more on that later) open, 12 open jobs are recorded in the statistics. In Yle’s story, they found a job that was recorded as 46 open positions instead of one.
Furthermore, statistics are being “beautified” by cases where multiple staffing agencies are looking for a worker for the same role. Those are also recorded as multiple open positions instead of one. Staffing agencies also look for people with ghost ads—meaning the job doesn’t actually exist in reality, but something might be found in the future. Yet, all of these are counted as open jobs.
From personal experience, I can say that one factory job I’ve applied for reappears in job search services every now and then. I’ve received an email three times saying the application didn’t proceed this time. A friend of mine does the same job, and it’s a basic role that can be learned through standard orientation. Of course, I understand that I might not necessarily be the one chosen. However, I’ve asked about it, and apparently, a suitable candidate hasn’t been found among the applicants yet. Especially the staffing agency still enthusiastically encourages people to submit applications, as if to raise hopes.
Good grief, there’s a 6-month probationary period for a permanent position, and hardly any skill requirements. The position has been open sometimes under the company’s own name and sometimes through a staffing agency. I don’t understand what the reason could be for not taking anyone to even try a simple task; instead, the position appears open every month or two with the exact same text. It raises the question of whether they are actually looking for a worker at all, or if they are just mapping out potential workers in case they are needed someday. Surely over ten open jobs have been recorded from that too, but according to the company’s own words, not a single employee has been hired. It seems so strange that I’m certainly not going there anymore, even if they were to contact me for some reason.
Well, after the MOT story, my own communication with staffing agencies will become more cautious, and I won’t apply for positions unless the client company is stated directly and the whole thing seems honest otherwise. I’ve been thinking that many of those ads don’t inspire any confidence, but I’ve applied mainly for lack of better options.
All these cuts to various benefits seem incomprehensible when even those few open jobs are recorded completely haphazardly, and the number of unemployed people is exploding despite “trick employment” measures and ghost jobs.
Then, according to the most extreme proposals, one should have to work for their benefits. Benefits are specifically there so people can get by when there is no work. Instead, when unemployed, one’s “job” should primarily be job hunting. For heaven’s sake, we don’t need to start developing an even larger free labor market here. The elderly need care and parks need cleaning, but those are real jobs for which a salary according to the collective agreement should be paid.
Picked from the story:
"We searched the data for more of these frequently occurring advertisements. How many had been republished with the same wording less than a month after the previous search had ended?
From ads renewed this frequently, 84,000 ”extra” jobs were found, which had been recorded as new jobs even though they were related to a previously announced search.
We also tracked down jobs distorting employment service statistics in another way.
Using this calculation method as well, almost the same amount—78,000 extra jobs—ended up in the employment service statistics. That corresponds to thousands of jobs every month.
In reality, the number is even larger, as only 30 percent of companies had entered ”their own reference data” in the ads. By combining reference data, we were thus able to find only a portion of the searches related to the same job.
”Useless” positions also end up in employment service statistics when the same jobs are sought through several parallel advertisements. For example, in the autumn in Tampere, four staffing agencies were filling the same chef position at the same time."
