A method to figure out whether a person will remain unemployed for long is being assessed, writes LAURA SLATTERY

SIGNING ON could involve answering a longer list of questions in the future, if the Department of Social and Family Affairs (DSFA) decides to “profile” dole applicants to assess their statistical chances of falling into long-term unemployment.

With unemployment forecast by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) to average at 16.8 per cent next year, the medium-term forecasters at the think tank have now moved beyond merely exploring ways to prevent the societal disaster of a so-called “lost generation” and towards something even more depressing: damage limitation.

On Thursday, the discussion at the ESRI labour market conference turned from the economic horror stories of the past and present to a future where resources must be tightly rationed.

It’s not just the immediate battle for survival that jobseekers’ benefit and assistance applicants face as they sit out the average waiting time of three to five weeks for their first payment.

There’s also the longer-term squeeze on the system, which means that the practice of referring benefit claimants to Fás for an interview after three months is in jeopardy.

The severity of the fiscal constraints means that “intervention” of this kind will have to be targeted at those most vulnerable to experiencing a slow erosion of their skills.

Presenting the findings from a “great experiment” in “profiling” carried out by the ESRI in conjunction with the DSFA between 2006 and 2008, Philip O’Connell and Séamus McGuinness said they believed a formal method could be used to reliably quantify the probability of whether someone who signs on will still be unemployed more than 12 months later.

Using a profiling model would allow the DSFA to identify at an early stage those individuals with a high risk of long-term unemployment and to intervene appropriately, according to O’Connell.

So in practice, how would this work? You lose your job and become just one of the recession’s many victims – one of the 188,800 people who have joined the Live Register over the past 12 months.

At your local DSFA office, as well as giving staff the standard information on name, age, address, occupation, marital status and spousal earnings, you’re also asked to fill out a questionnaire that aspires to predict whether you’ll prove to be a “stayer”, ie still on the Live Register after 12 months, or a “leaver”, in other words, destined to soon re-enter the labour market.

This questionnaire would ask about your levels of education, literacy and numeracy ability, medical history, access to transport, job history or prior experience of unemployment. Based on your answers, the DSFA would rank your prospects compared to your fellow applicants and then judge whether or not it will intervene in your case.

For example, if you’re calculated to have only a 30 per cent risk of becoming a “stayer”, the DSFA might decide that Fás should not “waste” its resources on you because you’re likely to find your way back to the daily grind all by yourself.

Follow-up interviews, training places, education schemes and community employment opportunities might be reserved for people whose risk of becoming long-term unemployed is within a certain statistical range, for example more than 80 per cent.

The presentation raised many questions from the audience, which included representatives of Fás, the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) and the DSFA.

One person questioned whether it was feasible to refuse someone a service because they had not been identified as a risk. Should profiling have the final say, or should the DSFA still adopt a “sweeper system”, checking up on those who might slip through the net? Another person pondered the notion that, if such a system was adopted, over time applicants would learn which answers led to which results.

There were also concerns that unemployed people might become further stigmatised if front-line staff were not correctly trained in the profiling process.

Ranking claimants in this way should be done not in the name of efficiency but rather to promote a more equitable use of services, it was noted.

O’Connell stressed that were the DSFA to develop a pilot profiling system, it would be pretty much pointless to use it to identify those at high risk of long-term unemployment unless training, education and employment schemes were available in the first place.