At a meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council in Luxembourg, the EU Council, which includes representatives of each of the 27 member states, agreed a joint position on the proposal, referred to as “Tinder for jobs” by EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson. 

The Council will now begin negotiating with the European Parliament to agree on the final legislative text on the proposal, which is part of the EU’s broader skills and talent mobility package. 

What’s the scheme?

“This will not replace anything but it will be an additional tool to make recruitment from outside the EU easier,” Johannes Kleis, a press officer at the European Council, told The Local. “It should help to overcome some barriers that employers might find if they look for staff outside the EU, and this portal will be an easier entry point for third country jobseekers.” 

In a press release announcing the agreement, the Council said it hoped to reconcile principles of fair recruitment with a secure and comprehensive migration system while also “reinforcing the position of the European Union in the global race for talent”. 

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The idea is to set up an EU-wide online platform where jobseekers from outside the EU can set up profiles detailing their skills, qualifications, work experience and which languages they speak. Employers from all participating member states will then be able to post up jobs to the platform. 

Only job vacancies involving skills or professions where member states or the EU as a whole have declared a labour shortage will be listed on the platform. 

The Talent Pool will be designed to help EU employers overcoming some of the challenges of recruiting internationally by helping ensure the “accuracy, quality and comparability” of the foreign applicants’ qualifications and skills. It will also help applicants overcome some of their current difficulties in “accessing and understanding information about recruitment processes” as well as reducing costs. 

The Talent Pool is not intended to set up a common work permit system, with anyone who gets a job through the platform still having to apply for a regular work permit in the country where they find a job. 

The Council has added several new proposals to the system put forward by the European Commission in November, setting up a withdrawal procedure through which member states can leave the Talent Pool after giving six month’s notice.

The Council also wants to empower member states to be able to decide whether individual employers can post up vacancies, whether private employment agencies can do so, or whether only state-run national employment agencies can do so.   

What happens next?

“We’re at the beginning,” Kleis said. “The European Parliament and the Council will now have to sit together to agree on the legal text, and that will happen after the summer. From the Council side, this is the first step but the legislation has yet to be agreed on. So there a lot more hoops to jump through.”