SEEMP: a networked marketplace for employment services

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the SEEMP marketplace of employment mediators, detailing the business objectives and main features of the SEEMP integrated technology platform. The purpose of SEEMP is to enable the meeting of Job Offers from employers and CVs of job seekers by developing an e-marketplace, improving the business activity of brokers in an employment market currently characterised by: Multiplicity of the players on the market and diversity of the distribution networks: Job Seekers and CVs are distributed across many online databases, brokers and intermediaries. In order to be sufficiently visible, a candidate or an enterprise has to contact several intermediaries, for example temporary work agencies, employment websites, with a redundancy of information and multiplication of the effort needed to correctly classify, qualify and maintain their data. Lack of common standard for Job Offer and CV: The lack of standardized descriptions and search criteria shared by the intermediaries prevents them to exchange information easily and effectively. Insufficient information sharing among the players on the labour market: Inspite of various existing information systems for e-employment, data sharing between entities of intermediary networks remains insufficient. The same holdsfor the cooperation aspects among players in the market, which need cooperative information systems technology. This paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we state the overall objectives of the SEEMP project and state the market vision of the project. In Sect. 3, we present the methodologies adopted in SEEMP in terms of minimal shared commitment that drives the SEEMP policies, and we describe the adopted best practices which help to clarify the agreement levels established for SEEMP and the SEEMP architecture used to implement the interoperability framework. In Sect. 4, we provide a demonstrative use case of the elements described in the paper; this use case is rather simple but proves difficult to solve at a European scale. Finally, in Sect. 5 we introduce some elements of discussion such as a comparison between SEEMP with EURES and other job boards and employment search engines, and set the stage for evaluating the SEEMP benefits for its intended actors; finally we give the concluding remarks.