Search Results (3)

This study aims to evaluate the impact of a selected active labour market policy measure that has been applied in Slovakia—Allowance for school graduate practice performance—on the employability of young jobseekers and their sustainability in the labour market, and thus, it will also empirically contribute to the field of relevant literature. The policy targets unemployed school graduates, and it enables them to acquire professional skills and practical experience that corresponds with their level of education, work habits, and possible direct contact with potential employers. At the same time, this measure addresses a long-standing gap in the Slovakian education system, namely, the insufficient linkages between the educational process, the practices in the field, and the requirements of the labour market. Using fiscal resources to finance this policy, it provides a natural and logical platform to investigate the relevance of the outcome of this measure in the context of its proclaimed objectives. In light of this, we employed a counterfactual approach to compare the results of the participants who were affected the measure (recipients; treated group) and non-participants, as their counterparts (comparison/control group), using an instrumental variable to mitigate self-selection and selection-bias problems. Our findings show that this policy intervention has a short- or medium-term impact on the employability of unemployed school graduates and the sustainability of their careers. In addition, a positive impact on their monthly wages was observed. We also came to the conclusion that, assuming the measure is linked to other labour market policy interventions, which is aimed at employers that are willing to hire young unemployed people, it would be possible to improve the functionality and effectiveness of support for the unemployed through indirect measures. Full article

This study aims to propose and empirically test a research model to examine the relationship between prospective employees’ corporate environmental responsibility (CER) perceptions and their attraction to an organization based on social theories. This may be the first study to elucidate how CER perceptions can influence prospective employees’ job-seeking intentions by exploring the sequential mediating mechanism of organizational trust and job-seeking attitudes in a prehire context. Collecting data from a sample of 357 young prospective employees, the research hypotheses were tested using path analysis with AMOS (version 24), a structural equation modeling (SEM) program. The study results revealed direct association of CER perceptions and job-seeking attitudes with job-seeking intentions. Observably, the organizational trust could not predict job-seeking intentions. However, organizational trust and job-seeking attitudes together sequentially and partially mediated the direct effects of CER perceptions on job-seeking intentions. In line with the research findings, some notable theoretical contributions and practical implications for HR professionals have been discussed. The paper concludes by presenting some limitations and future research directions. Full article

A necessary condition for economic development and raising living standards in Slovakia is to address employment issues in a way that would inter alia contribute to employment sustainability. This important fact mirrors in the study that directly analyses the employability and sustainability of young unemployed jobseekers, participants of the intervention “Graduate Practice”, in the Slovak labour market in 2014–2017 by applying a counterfactual approach. The intervention is one of the active policy measures in the labour market, and its implementation is subject to the specifics of the excluded group of the unemployed. Its aim is to help the members of the group find a job and gain work experience and habits. The impacts of the intervention on the employability and sustainability of young graduates were evaluated based on real data using the caliper-matching technique, the technique of the propensity score-matching method. The intervention database was relatively robust and included 42,626 participants over a 24-month impact period. In the analysis, we considered both the effectiveness and efficiency of the Graduate Practice. The findings point to no or very weak effects of the intervention, especially to the long-term sustainability of jobs. However, its impact on the state budget we consider as positive due to the intervention’s ability to reduce total costs of unemployed graduates. From the methodology point of view, the use of the method is appropriate in finding possible imbalances in the active and passive policies of the labour market. The results of the study themselves have the explanatory power not only for Slovak policymakers but also for policymakers at the level of the European Union. The results are helpful in creating other interventions and setting their conditions for future periods to bring a desired effect on employability and sustainability of members of excluded groups in general. Full article