Improving the Recruitment and Selection Process in Vietnam

Short Summary:

Topic: EMPLOYMENT

Background

        While precise definitions vary, jobs are labor activities that generate income, monetary or in kind, without violating fundamental rights and principles of work. Jobs can take the form of wage employment, self-employment, and farming whether they are formal or informal.

Jobs, and in particular the quantity and quality of new jobs created by economic growth, are shaping up to be one of the crucial development issues of the moment. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 440 million new jobs need to be created in the next ten years to keep up with population growth and demographic changes.

However, it is not just creating jobs that is the challenge. More than 3 billion people are working worldwide, but almost half of them are farmers or self-employed. Nearly half of all workers worldwide still live below 2 US dollars a day poverty line (ODI, 2011). Most of the poor work long hours but simply cannot make ends meet. The violation of basic rights at work is not uncommon. These evidences indicate that the key determinants of the relationship between growth, poverty reduction and inequality are whether economic growth generates new jobs, the quality of these jobs, whether poor people are able to take up new opportunities, and whether jobs are paid enough to reduce poverty.

Although many huge jobs challenges, it is inevitable that jobs are the key driver of development. The World Development Report 2013 indicates that jobs can be transformational along three dimensions: living standards, productivity and social cohesion. Poverty will fall as people work their way out of hardship (high living standards) and efficiency would increase as workers get better at what they do. As a result, societies will flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and social backgrounds and create a sense of opportunity (social cohesion). Therefore, poverty reduction policies in many countries are focusing not only on increasing employment opportunities but also on rising labor productivity. This report will focus on analyzing and discussing on three forms of creating jobs, which play very crucial role in supporting the poor, including: informal sector; income generating activities; pro poor land distribution.

1. Informal sector

The concept of the informal sector was first used by the International Labor Organization (ILO) to analyze economic activities in Kenya for an ILO Employment mission in 1972. The ILO team systematically analyzed these activities, noting that they were unrecognized, unrecorded, unreported and unregulated.  They also indicated that the informal sector included a range of activities from survivalist work to profitable enterprises. Since that time, many definitions were introduced by different authors and the ILO itself. However, the informal sector is still a topic which elicits diverging views, sometimes passionately so, about how to define it, how to measure and to classify it, and especially about how to respond to it. There is even debate on what to call it.