Digital or human support for the unemployed? Profiling tools and advisers at work in the French Public Employment Services
Résumé
Profiling of job seekers is traditionally carried out by advisors in public employment services. More recently, digital tools have been introduced to profile users and offer tailored services. The relationships between these two methods are studied based on a fieldwork in local PES agencies in France: Do the two methods coexist, or does the new replace the old? Are they experienced as complementary? And do they cause tensions in advisors’ work? We show that statistical profiling is firmly established, and without any major collective protest. But advisors do not fully embrace the tool, nor they use it in the same way. They combine the two methods very differently depending on their conceptions of their profession, which largely result from their backgrounds and modes of entry to the PES. Analysing the day-to-day work of advisors, we establish that profiling tools – and more broadly the digitalization of the work of advisors – have a paradoxical, even counterintuitive, effect. Indeed, while they are supposed to limit the discretionary power of advisors, they introduce a new source of unpredictability in the workplace: one that is indexed to the different uses of tools and the conception of the work and the profession.
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Ch8 PES profiling France.pdf (229.71 Ko)
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Ch8 PES profiling France Alizee (1).docx (68.09 Ko)
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Ch8 PES profiling France Alizee.docx (68.09 Ko)
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