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Will Google Jobs break 90 years of welfare policy?
Interesting blog piece on possible impact of ‘Google for Jobs’:
So what should happen to welfare policy when digital assistants replace the job of looking for a job?
One response could be to carry on regardless - forcing benefit claimants to continue to present evidence of time spent. But if digital assistants get good enough, then this will become tantamount to getting people to dig holes and fill them in again.
A more mature response would see changes both to what is expected from benefit claimants and to the data infrastructure that government provides to support job seeking.
More on the launch of ‘Google for Jobs’ in the US: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/google-to-launch-a-jobs-search-engine-in-the-u-s/
Reading both articles together I suspect the blog paints a rather rosier picture for the end of claimant commitments than the reality.
Google for Jobs sounds only marginally more sophisticated than my filtered Guardian jobs search at present so we’re a long way off bots searching for genuinely appropriate jobs. That’s before you get into the level of detail you would have to voluntarily donate to Google, which is essentially a company which gives your data away to advertisers rather than a search or product company. The people most likely to be digitally excluded are going to be benefit claimants (whether they have a UC account or not) and significant numbers of people are also going to be objecting to giving away the amount of data this would need to make it worthwhile. Not sounding a winner to me.
Let’s say for arguments sake that it delivers (and let’s face it just as there’s only a particular sort of person who thinks that Siri, Cortana and Alexa are wonderful and have made life easier, there’s also only a particular sort of person who thinks in terms of one problem and one solution) all that is likely to happen is that the claimant commitment will switch focus to ensuring people fill their time with actual work, possibly voluntary in nature.
The more likely outcome is that governments aren’t going to want this to work but will maybe buy into the search element of it to power things like UJM. The end result will be a more efficient and accurate UJM but one that will still need you to be seen to be doing the work of applying as that’s what politicians need you to do. Any other outcome would not be politically acceptable.