Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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114. To ask the Minister for Social Protection her plans to privatise the Department's Jobs Ireland website and if her attention has been drawn to the experience of same in Britain where the website once outsourced became rife with fake jobs. [39794/14]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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The Department is engaged in an ongoing programme to continuously improve its services. This continuous improvement programme is fundamental to the Department’s objectives of delivering a comprehensive service to people, positioning the Department to better adapt to changing customer needs and priorities, while delivering on internal effectiveness and efficiency goals. JobsIreland is a vacancy advertising system developed by FÁS in the early 2000s and is now the largest jobsite in Ireland. The current service is approaching its end of life and some of its functionality is limited compared to what is typically available on jobsites operated by public employment services in other States, in particular, with regard to the ability of employers and jobseekers to ‘match’ and ‘search’ for suitable candidates/jobs. The current system also operates outside of the Department’s IT architecture and would need development in order to integrate/automate information flows between the systems the Department uses to support jobseekers in Intreo centres and JobsIreland itself. It is therefore timely to consider refreshing/replacing the system.

The Department has therefore invited tenders for the provision, maintenance, support and operation of a new online Public Employment Jobs Matching/Vacancy Service, to replace the existing JobsIreland (www.JobsIreland.ie) service. If and when contracts are awarded the new service will continue to be administered and managed by the Department and there are no plans to privatise the service.