At Careers.sl, we are helping make labour markets more inclusive, innovative, flexible, and transparent. Careers.sl explores and leverages innovative low-cost ways in bringing job-seekers and employers together. Using technological paradigms like the Internet, WAP, and SMS, we lower the search cost and barrier to information for both job-seekers and employers, providing basic labor market information to them and a centralized meeting point wherein the two groups can interact. Through the provision of labor market information, Careers.sl aims to help overcome issues contributing to labor market failure based on unavailability, high search cost and asymmetric access to basic labor market information facing both job-seekers and employers. Unavailability and high search cost of job opportunities is a common theme in the cries of job-seekers while lack of qualified candidates to fill their positions is commonly heard from recruiters. However, there are both job opportunities and qualified candidates in the labor market; the reason for the seeming lack of both is a resultant of the in-existence of a centralized environment wherein both job-seekers and employers can fulfill their search requirements. In its simplest form, Careers.sl is a job-search engine wherein employers can publish their job adverts and receive applications from a much wider and diverse talent pool and job-seekers can search through hundreds of job applications and apply to ones that appeal to them.
Our labor market information comes in two main formats, public dissemination of active vacancies from around the country and provision of occupational and industrial trend analysis. This information is provided through a Labor Market Information System (LMIS) we built in-house over the course of the last two years. Apart from being a job-search engine, the LMIS provides quantitative and qualitative information and intelligence on the labor market that can assist labor market agents in making informed plans, choices, and decisions related to their business requirements, career planning, education and training offerings, job search, recruitment, labor policies and workforce investment strategies.
The LMIS though a complex piece of software behind the scenes, interfaces with the Web, SMS technology and Facebook to allow easy access to it, taking into consideration the high computer illiteracy and poor Internet infrastructure in our society.
Careers.sl has a high developmental value associated with it, this stems from the fact that it lowers the search cost and barrier to information for actors in the labor market place thus marking information more readily available, and increasing the quality and quantity of option sets.