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Oral Answer by Mr Tan Chuan-Jin, Acting Minister for Manpower, to Parliamentary Question on WDA's Jobs Bank

Notice Paper No. 412 of 2013 For The Sitting On 21 Oct 2013
Question No. 1535 For Oral Answer

MP: Mr Teo Siong Seng

To ask the Acting Minister for Manpower under the coming Fair Consideration Framework, whether the Ministry will link WDA's Job Bank with other established job banks for better efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Answer:

  1. Under the Fair Consideration Framework (FCF), which takes effect from 1 Aug 2014, companies making new applications for Employment Passes (EPs) must advertise the job vacancy on a new jobs bank administered by the Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA).  Even as we stay open to businesses and continue to complement our local workforce with foreign manpower, the framework will encourage businesses to improve their HR practices in considering Singaporeans more deliberately.
  2. In addition to playing an important role in the FCF, the new jobs bank will facilitate better job matching opportunities between local job seekers and employers. This is particularly important when we do have a very tight labour market. The jobs bank aims to provide local job seekers with an avenue to access a more comprehensive list of job vacancies and seeks to provide employers with better visibility of their job vacancies to a larger pool of candidates. All employers are welcome to post on the jobs bank, and we seek to develop the jobs bank to be a useful resource to both employers and local job seekers, and importantly for local agencies, because it is a good way for us to mine data and better understand how the economy and how the workforce is evolving as well.
  3. We are more than open to considering how we can collaborate with private jobs portals to achieve this. They are obviously concerned, we will be quite happy to work with them, and to consult with them in the months ahead to explore possible areas of collaboration that can improve the overall labour market efficiency and provide as much visibility of job opportunities to job-seekers as possible.