Three months ago, the State Employment Service launched an experiment in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv oblasts to improve its mechanism of cooperation with employers. The very first results showed that the experts were on the right track. It is now time to share their achievements. Representatives of eastern Ukraine’s regional and local job centers gathered in Kharkiv to sum up the experiment.
“What caused Ukraine’s Employment Service to pay such close attention to employers is economic stabilization, employment growth, and, therefore, a brisk demand for labor in this country,” says Volodymyr Halytsky, director of the State Employment Center, “and meeting the requirements of employers is one of our priorities.” The conference announced that experts of the Kharkiv Oblast Employment Service held over a thousand meetings with heads of regional enterprises during the four months of the experiment. As a result, they selected about 300 market-making businesses that need special attention, including the Kharkiv-based state-run aircraft factory. The Kharkiv Oblast Employment Center signed an agreement with the latter on cooperation in hiring, which calls for taking into account production specifics, for training specialists to meet the employer’s needs, and selecting job candidates to comply with the factory’s professional and skill stadards. Receiving a State Employment Center delegation, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Yevhen Kushnariov thus commented on the experiment’s positive results, “While in the first six months of 2003 our oblast was nineteenth on the list of Ukraine’s regions in terms of the rate of employment rate, this year we were fourth... The systematic approach tried in this experiment should undoubtedly be applied elsewhere, especially when addressing such an acute problem as the employment of the young people who have graduated from institutions of higher learning.” According to Volodymyr Minenko, director of the Kharkiv Oblast Employment Center, this problem can be solved by increasing the number of graduates who get a subsidized job, where the state compensates the specialist employed on a job center’s recommendation for the salary he/she was to be paid for a year. This kind of service is gaining popularity. During the past three years, the number of those obtaining a subsidized job in our region has risen almost threefold. Announcing these and other figures, Mr. Minenko also spoke about the prospects. The experiment is still ongoing. This means thousands of residents of this and other regions will get the job they have always wanted.
