Is an employment agency needed? That's a question some critics have been asking in recent years. The employment service, as well as its employees, have been considered by some to lack importance in the matching between those looking for a job and those looking for staff with the right skills.

In this RJ project, a group of national economists has taken the most ambitious approach to date in order to capture the characteristics that distinguish an effective job broker.

They also provide answers to the question of whether employment agencies play any role at all. They do, according to the researchers.

- Roughly speaking, you can say that employment agencies have an effect on how long or short unemployment you have. A good intermediary can shorten unemployment by approximately 10 percent compared to an average one, says Jonas Cederlöf, who did the study together with Martin Söderström and Johan Vikström.

The three national economists have had access to the Employment Service's employment register and, with the help of social security numbers, have been able to link it to other register data and thus obtained information on education level, experience, age, gender and more. For the male mediators, the conscription register's cognitive tests have also been used.

Good job brokers get more difficult cases

But how do you know which employment agencies are more effective than others? The issue is made more difficult by the fact that the mediators who are considered good often have to take care of the more difficult cases, i.e. the clients who are further away from the labor market.

But here the researchers have benefited from the fact that some employment agencies distribute the clients to different employment agencies based on the day of the month the clients were born. According to Jonas Cederlöf, it's the closest you can get to a draw.

- This is why we can say that we are doing a quasi-randomized study. There is a natural draw, he says.

Experience seems to make the employment agency more effective. The jobseekers who received an intermediary with two years in the profession or more had, on average, a shorter time in unemployment than others. On the other hand, job brokers with high education do not seem to succeed better on average, nor does the cognitive ability of the broker seem to play such a big role.

Industry knowledge matters

On the other hand, it is important if the employment agency has insights into the industry in which the jobseeker wants a job.

- If you are looking for a job in the private sector, it turns out that it is faster to get a job if the employment agent has his own experience and contacts in that sector, says Jonas Cederlöf.

He also sees that active job brokers who hold many meetings with the unemployed are more successful. And then he sees that female job brokers on average get a better result than male ones. The difference is approximately three percent shorter unemployment.

- Unfortunately, we have no answer as to why this is so. The effects are slightly greater if the job seeker is also a woman, says Jonas Cederlöf.

The study What makes a good caseworker has been done within the framework of the Institute for Labor Market Policy and Education Policy Evaluation, IFAU. A popular science report on the study will be published by IFAU this spring.

TEXT: Thomas Heldmark