Context and objectives

The Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal (SEPE), Spain’s public employment service, designed and adopted a new digital tool for employment counsellors, the Send@ tool, aiming to improve employment outcomes for job seekers. The tool was developed by SEPE in 2020, with the goal of being eventually rolled out for any job counsellor in any of the 17 regional Public Employment Services.

In order to design and conduct the impact evaluation of the tool, Spain requested technical support to the European Commission through the Structural Reform Support Programme (SRSP) The OECD and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG-Reform) have provided support to SEPE and the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy (MITES) since December 2020 (under framework delegation agreement REFORM/IM2020/004). The broader objective of this project is to support the efforts of Spanish authorities to define and implement appropriate processes and methodologies by taking into account good practices of and lessons learned by other countries in addressing similar situations. This project builds on a preceding technical support project “Modernisation of the management of statistical and analytical information at the Spanish Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security” (Contract number SRSS/S2019/036) which was funded by DG Reform and implemented by the OECD in cooperation with the European Commission. The previous project mapped the rich administrative data collected by the Spanish authorities and outlined a roadmap for implementing an impact evaluation framework. The current project with MITES and SEPE is conducted in parallel with technical support provided to the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations (MISSM) for the assessment and impact evaluation of some aspects of the new Minimum Income Scheme. 

Outputs

Final report

• Support SEPE/MITES in setting up the pilot (as a randomised controlled trial) and developing the monitoring and evaluation mechanism of the Send@ tool
  
  

• Collect necessary data and evaluate the impact of Send@

   

• Present the evaluation results and make recommendations
  
  
• Disseminate knowledge and distill lessons for future evaluations of SEPE and MITES meaures and tools

Relevance for other countries

This type of support could be relevant for other countries wishing to: i) design, implement and evaluate digital tools for public employment services; ii) develop monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for active labour market policies; and iii) test tools and interventions in an experimental way prior to implementing them on a large scale. The OECD is currently working with the European Commission (DG-Reform and DG-Employment) and several EU and OECD countries (e.g. Canada, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania and Portugal), to conduct counterfactual impact evaluations of labour market and social policies by using linked administrative and survey data. The goal of these projects is to build countries’ capacities to regularly conduct similar evaluations in the future.