Australia’s official jobs board website is “unworkable” and is letting job seekers down, says a frustrated recruiter who has left the service.
Graham Wynn, the founder of Superior People Recruitment, told Daily Mail Australia that Centrelink’s Workforce Australia job portal, which the unemployed use to apply to advertised vacancies, was an example of “bureaucracy gone mad”.
The website’s glaring flaw is that it doesn’t provide job seeker contact information to recruiters, making it almost pointless.
Mr. Wynn claims the site, which replaced the JobActive website on July 1 last year, is so bad that “a lot of recruiters just don’t use this service” and that his own company no longer posts jobs on it.
“They’ve made it much harder for people to find work and have made it much harder for us to find candidates because of the way it works,” he said.
Superior People Recruitment founder Graham Wynn says the new Centrelink job-matching website is so ‘awful’ that he and other recruiters have stopped using it
“For me, that’s the real challenge we’re facing right now, it’s just unworkable.”
The previous JobActive system sent an email to a recruiter with an application and resume attached when someone applied for an advertised job.
However, now recruiters must log into the system to see if applicants have created a profile that does not contain contact information.
The only chance a recruiter has of getting in touch through the site is if the job seeker has attached a resume, which is optional.
“They may have some good experiences, but if we don’t get a resume, there’s no way to contact us,” said Mr. Wynn.
Job seekers tracked down by recruiters through LinkedIn and other means have been shocked to discover that the Workforce Australia site provides no contact details.
“Nobody explained that to them, so when they’re looking for work, they’ve made it harder for them,” said Mr. Wynn.
Despite “numerous discussions” recruiters have had with the Department of Labor about correcting the glaring mistake, the bureaucrats are unflinching, citing “privacy reasons.”
Centrelink’s Workforce Australia website was launched in early July last year and replaced the previous JobActive site
“They were afraid they would have too much personal information in case of hackers, but it’s a safe website, it’s a government website, you would think it would be safe,” Wynn said.
“It’s detrimental to getting people back to work and for those who are really looking for work, it’s made it harder for them.”
He pointed out that private recruitment websites like Seek always include a job seeker’s details with an application “so how can this be a privacy issue?”
A blog posted by Superior People Recruitment last year mentioned a number of other frustrations with Workforce Australia.
It called the website the “slowest in existence” and said it took an average of 4-5 minutes to download an application.
While recruiters could advertise that applicants had to be vaccinated against Covid in order to qualify, the question manual recruiters asked could bar them from asking about the jab, arguing it was “discrimination.”
So jobs could be advertised as requiring the jab, but recruiters couldn’t ask applicants if they had received it.
Mr Wynn said another issue was that Workforce Australia asked for addresses for the vacancies, but that was against standard recruitment practices as it could reveal a client.
“The work-around is simply entering a random address, that is, in the same area where the job is located,” he said.
“So if we can enter any address, what’s the point? You used to be able to just add a district to it.’
Recruiters had also complained that the job categories were too basic and didn’t describe the specialist positions they wanted to advertise.
Mr Wynn said it’s ‘a shame that the people who make these decisions about putting systems like this in place never actually talk to the people who use them’.
Mr Wynn said jobseekers he had managed to reach through other means were unaware that recruiters could not get their contact details from the Workforce Australia site
Australia has been facing a chronic labor shortage since the pandemic closed the country’s borders and sent many long-term visa holders home.
Sky News presenter Paul Murray pointed out on Thursday that there were 438,500 job openings in Australia, questioning why 40,000 people had been on JobSeeker for 10 years or more.
“Now I have no doubt that some of those people are chronically unemployed for a whole collection for various reasons,” Mr Murray said.
“But I refuse to believe that a football stadium of people (40,000) is unemployed in this country.”
Hiring firm Maxima says industries particularly clamoring for workers include food manufacturing, retail and delivery, healthcare, IT, transportation and warehousing, call centers and mining.
The Business Council of Australia on Wednesday highlighted the disturbing statistic of 40,000 people who have languished on social benefits for more than a decade and argued it was a failure to get the long-term unemployed into employment.
Council President Jennifer Westacott said that in such a tight labor market there was something ‘deeply wrong’ with the job placement system that was unable to get people into work.
“This should be aimed at improving the job placement system, to create more incentives for people to enter and stay in the labor market,” Ms Westacott said.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has been contacted for comment.