Bridging the Gap: How Tunisia is Connecting Job Seekers to Opportunities

The Tunisian authorities are reforming policies and institutions to more effectively address to persistent unemployment rates (16% in Q2-2024) especially among women (21.3%) — including those with higher education (30.6%) — and youth (41%). Additionally, 23% of youth Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET). (Sources: INS for unemployment rates; World Development Indicators for NEET rate.)

As part of their efforts to address persistent unemployment and labor underutilization, Tunisian authorities have sought the World Bank’s support to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the National Agency for Employment and Self Employment’s (ANETI), the Tunisian agency responsible for job placement, active labor market programs, and employment services. 

ANETI’s programs play an important role in facilitating labor market transitions – whether from school or inactivity to work, out of unemployment or from one job to another. These programs offer a wide range of services, including employment services — such as counseling, job‐search assistance, and intermediation—skills certification, training, wage subsidies, as well as interventions to support the self‐employed or entrepreneurs. The objective of these programs is to provide a comprehensive range of services for individuals facing multiple challenges in securing employment or starting a business. 

As part of its 2030 Vision plan, the ANETI is prioritizing reforms to digitalize employment services and enhance the services offered to jobseekers and employers, with a specific emphasis on youth. Currently, the reliance on numerous and cumbersome paper-based procedures means that a job counselor spends on average, 60 % of his or her time on creating, processing, and supervising subsidized contracts, 25 % on administrative tasks, and only 15 % on direct services to job seekers such as job assistance, training or placement. 

ANETI is receiving technical and financial assistance from the World Bank to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of its Active Labor Market Programs (ALMPs) to fully meet the needs of job seekers and employers. This support, “Go4Youth”, is conducted in the context of ANETI’s Vision 2030 plan for reform, and more specifically, the digitalization of the employment services, improvement of services offered to jobseekers as well as employers.  

One of ANETI’s main reforms being supported by the Bank is the digitalization of services. In fact, deploying digitalization will significantly enhance ANETI's efficiency and effectiveness in providing services to both job seekers and employers.  ANETI is currently mainly focused on providing youth with subsidized contracts. Because of numerous and cumbersome paper-based procedures, a job counselor spends, on average, 60 percent of his or her time on creating, processing, and supervising subsidized contracts, 25 percent on administrative tasks, and only 15 percent on services to job seekers such as job assistance, training or placement. Digitization will thus improve the efficiency of new services introduced by the Vision 2030 reform. Activities financed under the Go4Youth engagement include developing and implementing a matching tool with the global firm specialized WCC, dematerializing of documents and emails, upgrading equipment and connectivity and refurnishing the datacenter. Significant efficiency gains would be expected, mainly thanks to simplified procedures, reorganized work, digitalization of processes, and dematerialization of documents. These actions would put the support of job seekers back at the heart of the counselors' work. 

To address this inefficiency, ANETI is developing and implementing a digital matching tool that dematerializes documents and emails handling, upgrades equipment and connectivity and refurnishes the datacenter. This initiative is expected to lead to significant efficiency gains through simplified procedures, reorganization of work, digitization of processes, and document dematerialization. The World Bank, through the TERI Umbrella Program 2.0, and the EU-funded "Go4Youth" project is supporting these efforts, which has already achieved several concrete results, including:

Segmenting and profiling jobseekers for tailored services. The project is supporting the development of an online registration system and an interview guide to segment jobseekers using ANETI services. This digital system, consisting of online processes and tools, has already enabled over 4,000 job seekers to complete the pre-positioning questionnaire thus allowing for their segmentation into 5 macro segments. Rolled-out across six pilot offices, this has also led to 2,600 in-person diagnostic interviews conducted by ANETI counselors trained in this new system.

Refocusing time on the flagship tool: “Contracts of Professional Integration (CIVP)”. The digital tool developed through the GO4Youth project allows both job seekers and companies to fill out all the necessary information online for generating the CIVPs necessary paperwork. Since its launch, 2,800 new companies have completed their registration, 92% of which have been validated and are currently active in the system. This led to the creation of 9,100 new contracts, of which 7,750 have already started.  Throughout the pilot offices, the automatic generation of subsidized employment contracts permitted a productivity gain of 1000 man-days for counsellors.

Offering job seekers new services: Job Search Techniques Workshops (TRE): Consisting of eight modules, these workshops are designed to strengthen job seekers' skills and improve their job search techniques. A total of 160 workshops modules were performed in five out of the six pilot employment offices for an average of 10 participants per module. Based on strong positive feedback from participants, ANETI has decided to expand the program across all its employment offices.

Standardizing private sector offers with a new Job Offer Management System: This tool enhances ANETI’s job matching effectiveness by ensuring employers receive candidates with the right profile and competency through a redesigned approach to job offer management and collaboration with private sector companies. To further increase efficiency and better respond to employers’ needs, the companies are segmented based on various criteria such as size, sector of activity, location, and hiring needs. This segmentation not only ensures the appropriate level of service to the company but also optimizes human resource management within each local ANETI employment office. Based on feedback from a survey on private sector support, ANETI has also developed additional services to address private sector’s needs, including a series of guides on drafting job offers, conducting job interviews, labor law, and employees' rights and obligations.

Matching job seekers to offers through ELISE matching software that ANETI will be the first in Africa to use: This server-based matching engine, with separate dedicated portals for jobseekers, employers, and counselors’ profiles, matches jobseekers with job offers. It uses established skill-taxonomies and competency frameworks based on which the jobseeker is assigned a ranked ‘match score’. Employers can post vacancies specifying the required skills needed to perform the job. Already in use in several European countries, ANETI will be the first in Africa to use this platform.

The next steps would be to covering all of ANETI employment offices in a phased scale up: Following the successful implementation of the pilot phase in six local employment offices, ANETI is now fully committed to move to the “scale-up phase”, which will extend these tools and processes to 41 new local employment offices, covering 42% of ANETI’s local offices. This new phase was launched in September 2024. 

In conclusion, the Tunisian authorities, with the support of the World Bank through TERI and the EU-funded Go4Youth project, are making significant strides in addressing the persistent unemployment challenges, particularly among women and youth leveraging advanced matching technologies, ANETI is not only improving efficiency but also ensuring that jobseekers and employers receive tailored and effective support. The successful pilot phase has set a strong foundation for the upcoming scale-up, which aims to extend these innovative solutions to a broader network of employment offices, thereby amplifying the impact and fostering a more dynamic and inclusive labor market in Tunisia.