From the new year each employer in Slovakia is obliged to announce all job vacancies. Companies which ignore the law can be fined up to 300 euros (about 7600 CZK).
According to the head of the UPSVaR (Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family), a company can get around this law by publishing any vacancy on the Profesia.sk or Kariera.sk portals. The state will then grant an exemption from the above-mentioned obligation to the firm, which will not have to use other means to advertise the position.
Discrimination of smaller sites
However, according to Andrew Winter, founder of the JobAngels Job Portal, all the smaller sites are being discriminated against, thus disturbing fairness of competition on the market.
in connection with the law, Winter wrote on LinkedIn: "Together with eight other work portals, we have filed a protest at the Labour Office for the violation of multiple legal provisions, and we call for an immediate equalisation of conditions for all work portals in Slovakia, regardless of size or impact. You can download our submission here."
The relevant paragraph, which supplements Act No. 5/2004 Coll. on employment services, reads as follows: "The employer is obliged to announce the vacancy and its characteristics to the office in whose territorial area the workplace is located; this does not apply to a job vacancy for which the employer provides data to the public administration information system operated on the central public administration portal in accordance with a special regulation."
Are big players an exception?
This idea is based on the fact that clients of Profesia.sk and Kariera.sk will automatically fulfil the aforementioned obligation. "Thanks to this, we can save our clients unnecessary bureaucratic costs," says Profesia.sk. The company belongs to the Alma Media Group, which also includes the Czech company LMC, which runs the largest Czech job portals Jobs.cz and Prace.cz.
In the Czech Republic there has been no mandatory job vacancy reporting for employers since 2012; it is purely voluntary. A company can continue to recruit employees with the help of the Czech Labour Office, from whom it may request information on the labour market situation or advisory activity when selecting suitable candidates.
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