Job Hunting: Looking for The Most Suitable Location of Public Employment Offices in Brazil

The location of offices of public employment services matters. It can bring jobseekers and vacancies closer together to accelerate the matching process and make the best use of resources. In the case of Brazil, financial consolidation calls for better job placement and better spending of public resources. In this line, the Labor Markets and Social Security Division (LMK) in cooperation with the Ministry of Labor developed a tool to objectively identify where offices of public employment services (PES) could be (re)located to spend resources more efficiently. Using a three-stage methodology, this technical note presents and discusses the tool to indicate where the most suitable locations for offices of employment services should be to increase the probability of finding a job and filling a vacancy. The first stage computes a ranking of PES offices employing variables of demand and supply of labor as well as the intermediation capacity of PES offices. The second stage replicates this index at a municipality level to determine the potential of municipalities to host PES offices. Finally, we combine both stage with georeferenced parameters such as distance to transport stations and capital cities to map where PES offices should be located, allowing end-users to control the influence of variables in determining spatial suitability.