For people who pass by Santhome High Road often, the sight of a crowd thronging the counters of the employment exchange is not unusual.
Among the regular visitors here are S. Tamilkadhalan and K. Vallavan, both holders of M. Phil in Tamil literature from Bharathiyar University, from Dharmapuri. “The officials said we need not come here to register, but the website was not working in our place. Here it does, but it would be much better if it is in Tamil,” says Vallavan. It is been almost three years since Vallavan registered his details in the employment exchange but he is yet to get a call. “I think they really do not have any postings for Tamil graduates,” he adds.
To solve many of these problems that job seekers such as Vallavan have, the virtual employment exchange is getting revamped to introduce many new initiatives, which includes the facility to register, renew and update their profiles from homes or internet centres, without having to approach employment exchanges.
Efforts are being made to make the portal bilingual to suit Unicode format and have Tamil font, said Santhosh Babu, Secretary, Department of Information Technology.
When the website was launched in September two years ago, it immediately went dysfunctional because of the surge in the number of applications. But now, the website has been scaled up to hold the records of school drop outs, diploma holders, graduates and employers, says Santhosh Mishra, Director and Member Secretary, State Mission for the Scheme of Employable Skill Training to the Unemployed Educated Youth. Over 200 people from various States visit the employment exchange everyday, and the portal already has details of 11,80,000 candidates.
While everything on the job seeker's side is being automated, the details would be made available to employers in the government and private sector by the end of this year, says P. Anasuya, regional deputy director, Virtual Employment Exchange.
The employers would mainly include companies in the telecom, IT, automobile and hospitality industry. Mobile phone registration and SMS alerts to the candidates and facilitating conversations with the potential employers are the other initiatives that would be introduced soon.
New rules say that the candidate might get a printout of his id card in any internet centre, but there is still confusion among those who had registered with the exchange much before it went online.
“It would be indeed nice if they can also look into the profiles of people who had registered manually,” says D. Prakash, a diploma holder in electronics who had registered with the exchange in 2006, and is yet to receive a call. “I had registered long ago, but I did not get my reference number. Here, I had to register again with the help of the officials. Many of us are not trained in the procedure,” says Ancey Prabhakar, a nursing student from Tiruvallur.
Earlier, the candidates could register online, but had to come to the exchange for the verification of the certificates, but now they would just have to submit an online declaration form that holds them responsible for their information. Gathering data from schools and colleges has also ensured there are no backlogs this year, says Ms. Anasuya. “The aim is to make sure that people waste no time or money in coming here or sending us copies of their certificates. But the fact the people still keep coming here might defeat the whole purpose of the virtual exchange.”
