The government's job centres (Pȏle Emploi) are better at finding jobs for the unemployed than private staffing and outplacement agencies, according to new research carried out among 5,000 job seekers by the Ministry of Employment, L'Express newspaper reports.

In 2009 the government decided to hand over the task of finding jobs for 320,000 job seekers to private staffing agencies because, due to the economic crisis, the job centres were overworked to such a degree that they were almost entirely concentrating on handing out unemployment benefits rather than finding jobs for people.

The new research reveals that among job seekers who have been made redundant for economic reasons, 47% of those who were looked after by Pȏle Emploi found a job within 13 months compared with 43% of those who were looked after by staffing agencies.

Among the so-called 'very far removed from the employment market' (long-term unemployed, older job seekers...), 49% of Pȏle Emploi job seekers found a job compared with 43% of job seekers who were looked after by staffing agencies.

However, staffing agencies scored +5 percentage points higher than the government's job centres when it came to finding permanent jobs (CDI) as opposed to jobs on limited period contracts (CDD).

The research has also re-started the debate on whether the government is paying private staffing agencies too much for finding jobs. Private staffing agencies receive on average 2,200 Euro per worker per annum compared with only 1,100 Euro charged by Pȏle Emploi.

Despite the outcome of the research, the government does not plan to pass job seekers sub-contracted to private staffing agencies back to Pȏle Emploi. Instead, private staffing agencies will be asked to specialise on specific types of job seekers and specific sectors of the labour market in order to improve their effectiveness and justify their higher fees.