The current economic and financial crisis leads to deterioration in the unemployment rate in Taiwan. In order to resolve this tough issue, the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, Council of Labor Affairs of Executive Yuan has been aggressively conducting Employment Service Outreach Program to reduce the unemployment rate. Under Employment Service Outreach Program, the outreach personnel are recruited, trained, and supervised to perform the duties including identifying unemployed persons and then providing job information for them, using the social resource link to increase employment opportunities, conducting employer forum or workshops for job-seekers, and so on. This study applies decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method to not only evaluate the importance of the criteria but also construct the causal relationships among the criteria of evaluating outreach personnel. The results show that identification of the number of unemployed people and number of follow-up visit are the two most essential causes under the category of job-seeking service when the performance of outreach personnel in Employment Service Outreach Program is evaluated.
Due to the current economic and financial crisis, the US economy is increasingly gloomy. The US government figures showed that the economy contracted by a 3.8% in the final quarter of 2008, which is the worst performance since 1982. Moreover, the chief executives of leading US companies are increasingly pessimistic over the chances that the recession will subside in the near future. They expect a significant global economic slowdown, and the US recession will continue into 2010. In contrast to the US, European countries have been impacted almost immediately after the US subprime mortgage mess severely. In East Asia, the major countries have been hit hard by this contemporaneous economic downturns including Taiwan.
Taiwan, an export-oriented country, suffered the negative economic growth of 8.36% in the fourth quarter of 2008, which is the worse figure for any quarter in the history. The predicted economic growth of 2009 is −2.97% by Directorate-General Budget, Accounting and Statistics of Executive Yuan, Taiwan, compared to the economic growth ranging from 4.2% to 6.7% between 2004 and 2007. The unemployment rate has been dramatically increasing from 3.80% in January 2008 to 5.31% in January 2009, which is a tough issue to be resolved by the government. Therefore, the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, Council of Labor Affairs of Executive Yuan has been aggressively conducting Employment Service Outreach Program to reduce the unemployment rate.
This program performed by outreach personnel includes identifying unemployed persons and then providing job information for them, using the social resource link to increase employment opportunities, conducting employer forum or workshops for job-seekers, and the like. These outreach personnel are recruited, trained, and supervised to perform the above duties. If their performance has not been achieved, new recruiters will replace those poor performers. To properly evaluate the performance of outreach personnel, major criteria should be identified. Moreover, the weighting for each criterion should be determined fairly such that the overall evaluation can be more objective. Furthermore, establishing the causal relationships among the criteria would be helpful for outreach personnel to improve performance.
This study intends to summarize the criteria used for performance evaluation of outreach personnel. Later, decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is applied to not only decide the weights of criteria but also describe the contextual relationships among those criteria. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly reviews DEMATEL method. A case study of applying DEMATEL method to evaluate the criteria used for outreach personnel of Employment Service Outreach Program in Taiwan is conducted and described in Section 3. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 4.
This study applies DEMATEL method not only to evaluate the importance of criteria but also to describe the contextual relationships among those criteria used in Employment Service Outreach Program personnel. Unlike the traditional multiple criteria decision making techniques which typically assume the criteria are mutually independent; this technique does not require this assumption but further helps the decision makers in identifying the casual relationships among criteria. In addition, 13 respondents are the decision-makers responsible for performance evaluation of outreach personnel in Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, Council of Labor Affairs of Executive Yuan in Taiwan, which make the causal relationships more valuable. The results show that identification of the number of unemployed people and number of follow-up visit are the two most essential causes under the category of job-seeking service when the performance of outreach personnel in Employment Service Outreach Program is evaluated.
