 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Universal Jobmatch was a British website for finding job vacancies. The site was developed in a collaboration between the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Monster Worldwide, an American provider of employment services that operates Monster.com, a global employment website. [1]
The website replaced the JobCentre Plus' Job Search Tool and Employer Services Direct, which were part of the Directgov online system set up in the UK's New Deal employment system. The service was introduced as part of a Government project to enable the DWP to monitor client's jobsearch activities directly, and as part of its "Digital By Default" agenda to migrate more British citizens to subscribe to an online process when claiming both unemployed and in-work benefits. [2] The service was switched prematurely live through an AlphaTesting System in November 2012, and was commended as being a perfect system by Secretary of State for Work and Pensions George Iain Duncan Smith in November 2012,[ citation needed ] but remained a work in progress. At the same time that Universal Jobmatch was switched on, the DWP closed its existing processes supporting Job Search and Employer Services Direct, migrating its customers to the new system, and reported that 460,000 employers were posting jobs and the site was receiving over 6 million searches per day. By February 2013 there were 2 million registered users. [3]
Early controversy arose due to some of the people who registered with Universal Jobmatch being targeted by dubious organisations and individuals in financial scams. [4] Channel 4 News ran a feature, in December 2012, which explained how this new government service was being used to obtain personal details of jobseekers. [5] Instead of resolving this issue, Monster (which operated the system on behalf of the DWP), required all users, when creating an account, to accept a number of terms and conditions of use, [6] including the clause that they "don't accept liability for loss or damage incurred by users of the website".
From January 2013, Universal Jobmatch stated regularly on their relevant web pages that users should "never ever give out things like scanned passports, national insurance numbers or bank account details until a job offer has officially been made". [7] [8] [9] [10] The site was also made a lot more user-friendly and less verbose in mid 2013. [4]
On 12 February 2014, it was revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request [11] that Monster did not win the Universal Jobmatch tender, falling into last place on value and second to last place on evaluation scoring, [12] until the service was put back out to tender. [13]
The Government paid Methods Consulting Limited and Jobsite UK (Worldwide) Limited £950,000 compensation, [14] who should have won both tenders, when the new contract was awarded.
Concerns were raised as to how Monster's "satisfactory" evaluation score and high bid in the first tender, resulted in a near-perfect evaluation score in the second tender and a bid of under half the original which in turn made them competitive. Allegations of insider dealing and corruption were made because of this. [12]
According to a report in The Guardian in March 2014, leaked documents from the DWP indicated that the government had formulated plans to scrap Universal Jobmatch when the contract for the site came up for renewal in 2016, due to the numbers of fake and repeat job adverts posted to the site and because of cost concerns. [15]
On 26 April 2018 a message was placed on the home page saying the service would be replaced by "Find a job" on 14 May 2018. [16] Users were advised to save their information by 17 June 2018 as logins would not be moved to the new system. [17] [16]
There was no requirement for jobseekers to register with Universal Jobmatch. Anonymous searches could be made by people looking for jobs, and applications could be made directly to companies that had posted their contact details. However, as of 1 March 2013, JobCentre Plus advisers could, if giving a good reason, require Jobseeker's Allowance claimants to use the site through a JobSeeker Direction. If they refused to comply, they could be recommended for a benefit sanction. A decision-maker took the final decision over whether benefit should be removed, which as a consequence of the UK Government's Welfare Reform Act 2012, could lead to a loss of state benefits for up to 3 years. [8] [18] [19]
Registered users had the option to allow the DWP to have access to their account to allow the department to monitor their activity. Whilst this was not mandatory, some claimants were threatened with benefit sanctions for not doing so. [20]
Hacktivists created an plug-in addition for the Google Chrome browser to allow the automatic distribution of CVs to any recruiters through Universal Jobmatch. [21]
Unemployment benefits, also called unemployment insurance, unemployment payment, unemployment compensation, or simply unemployment, are payments made by governmental bodies to unemployed people. Depending on the country and the status of the person, those sums may be small, covering only basic needs, or may compensate the lost time proportionally to the previous earned salary.
The New Deal was a workfare programme introduced in the United Kingdom by the first New Labour government in 1998, initially funded by a one-off £5 billion windfall tax on privatised utility companies. The stated purpose was to reduce unemployment by providing training, subsidised employment and voluntary work to the unemployed. Spending on the New Deal was £1.3 billion in 2001.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. As the UK's biggest public service department it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. It is the second-largest governmental department in terms of employees, and the second largest in terms of expenditure.
Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) is an unemployment benefit paid by the Government of the United Kingdom to people who are unemployed and actively seeking work. It is part of the social security benefits system and is intended to cover living expenses while the claimant is out of work.
Jobcentre Plus is a brand used by the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom.
Directgov was the British government's digital service portal which from 2004 provided a single point of access to public sector information and services. The site's portal was replaced by the new GOV.UK website on 17 October 2012, although migration of all services to GOV.UK branding took several years.
Social security, in Australia, refers to a system of social welfare payments provided by Australian Government to eligible Australian citizens, permanent residents, and limited international visitors. These payments are almost always administered by Centrelink, a program of Services Australia. In Australia, most payments are means tested.
Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) is a United Kingdom welfare payment for adults younger than the State Pension age who are having difficulty finding work because of their long-term medical condition or a disability. It is a basic income-replacement benefit paid in lieu of wages. It is currently being phased out and replaced with Universal Credit for claimants on low incomes, although the contribution-based element remains available.
Incapacity Benefit was a British social security benefit that was paid to people facing extra barriers to work because of their long-term illness or their disability. It replaced Invalidity Benefit in 1995. The government began to phase out Incapacity Benefit in 2008 by making it unavailable to new claimants, and later moved almost all the remaining long-term recipients onto Employment and Support Allowance.
Median household disposable income in the UK was £29,400 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2019, up 1.4% (£400) compared with growth over recent years; median income grew by an average of 0.7% per year between FYE 2017 and FYE 2019, compared with 2.8% between FYE 2013 and FYE 2017.
A4e was a for-profit, welfare-to-work company based in the United Kingdom. The company began in Sheffield in 1991 with the objective to provide redundant steelworkers with the training required to obtain new jobs.
Universal Credit is a United Kingdom based social security payment. It is means-tested and is replacing and combining six benefits, for working-age households with a low income: income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), income-based Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA), and Income Support; Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Working Tax Credit (WTC); and Housing Benefit. An award of UC is made up of different elements, which become payable to the claimant if relevant criteria apply: a standard allowance for singles or couples, child elements and disabled child elements for children in the household, housing cost element, childcare costs element, as well as elements for being a carer or having an illness or disability and therefore having limited capability to work.
R v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2013] UKSC 68 is a United Kingdom constitutional law and labour law case that found the conduct of the Department for Work and Pensions "workfare" policy was unlawful. Caitlin Reilly, an unemployed geology graduate, and Jamieson Wilson, an unemployed driver, challenged the Jobcentre policy of making the unemployed work for private companies to get unemployment income. The outcome of the case affects over 3,000 claimants and entails around £130m unpaid benefits.
Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) was a workfare programme in the United Kingdom whereby individuals had to work for their benefits or risk being "sanctioned" and losing them. MWA started in May 2011, but in November 2015 the DWP confirmed it was "not renewing" it. An academic analysis by the Department for Work and Pensions cast doubt on the effectiveness of MWA, and despite finding "little evidence" that workfare improved claimants gaining paid employment, the DWP ignored the findings of the study, and in June 2012, the scheme received a £5m expansion. A similar but little-known scheme "Jobseeker Mandatory Activity" (JMA) was piloted by New Labour in 2006, but did not last beyond 2008. JMA targeted those claimants 25 and over, who had been unemployed for 6 months or more and made claimants liable to "sanction" for non-compliance.
Workfare in the United Kingdom is a system of welfare regulations put into effect by UK governments at various times. Individuals subject to workfare must undertake work in return for their welfare benefit payments or risk losing them. Workfare policies are politically controversial. Supporters claim that such policies help people move off welfare and into employment whereas critics argue that they are analogous to slavery or indentured servitude and counterproductive in decreasing unemployment.
The Work Programme (WP) was a UK government welfare-to-work programme introduced in Great Britain in June 2011. It was the flagship welfare-to-work scheme of the 2010–2015 UK coalition government. Under the Work Programme the task of getting the long-term unemployed into work was outsourced to a range of public sector, private sector and third sector organisations. The scheme replaced a range of schemes which existed under previous New Labour governments including Employment Zones, New Deal, Flexible New Deal and the now abolished Future Jobs Fund scheme which aimed to tackle youth unemployment. Despite being the flagship welfare-to-work scheme of the Conservative-led coalition government, and then the incumbent Conservative government from May 2015, the DWP announced, in November 2015, that it was replacing the Work Programme and Work Choice with a new Work and Health Programme for the longer-term unemployed and those with health conditions. The DWP also announced that it would not be renewing Mandatory Work Activity and Help to Work which included Community Work Placements.
The Welfare Reform Act 2012 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom which makes changes to the rules concerning a number of benefits offered within the British social security system. It was enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 8 March 2012.
The Jobseekers Act 2013 is an emergency Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom introduced to the House of Commons in March 2013. It retrospectively changed the law to make past actions of the government which the courts had found unlawful to be lawful. As of July 2014, the Act has been found to contravene Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Community Work Placements were a UK Government workfare scheme under which unemployed claimants had to work for up to 26 weeks/30 hours in order to continue to receive Jobseekers Allowance The policy has been criticized by a number of organizations. Community Work Placements (CWPs) were launched at the start of 2014, but it was announced in November 2015, that the DWP was "not renewing" them.
Iain Duncan Smith served as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2010 to 2016. A member and previous leader of the Conservative Party, Duncan Smith was appointed to the cabinet by Prime Minister David Cameron following the 2010 general election and the formation of the coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He was reappointed after the Conservatives won a majority in the 2015 general election but resigned in March 2016 in opposition to disability benefit cuts.
Universal Jobmatch will be replaced by the Find a job service on 14 May 2018. Important: If you have an existing Universal Jobmatch account it will not move to the new service. Save any information you want to keep, like your CV, cover letters and application history by 17 June 2018.
