One thing that's bothering me right now is the number of adverts that I wade through as part of my job search. I'm not talking about paid jobs because they are supposed to be there... I'm talking about voluntary roles. More specifically, I'm talking about Do-it.org.
Do-it.org is a website where the charity sector can advertise their voluntary roles for members of the public to apply for. It is given free advertising from the Department for Work and Pensions, with work coaches advising claimants to look on there for voluntary roles that they can do to help them to gain experience of the workplace environment.
As far as equal opportunities go, it doesn't have the best record for equal opportunities in my book, with disabled people being automatically declined a chance to demonstrate their ability to carry out the role before they are rejected from the opportunity outright.
In all fairness, charities used to have a website of their very own that they could use to recruit volunteers - until they screwed it up by setting the length of time that their ads would be live for to the maximum value allowed, then leaving them there until they expired.
Anyone who is genuinely looking to volunteer is only going to put up with doing so much ringing around to be told "Sorry, we've filled that role" before they give up bothering with that particular website entirely - especially when you consider that these people are now some of the poorest and most vulnerable in the country. It's not fair to have them use their benefits to waste time calling for a voluntary role that was never available in the first place.
I strongly suspect that this is the reason why charities have now resorted to advertising their voluntary roles on websites that the unemployed are using in their attempts to find employment. Even though they are usually clearly marked as voluntary roles, I fear that there is a chance that some people could actually confuse voluntary roles with paid roles because I'm not ashamed to admit that it has almost happened with me! The only thing that made me realise my mistake was the charity's logo on the side of the advert.
Another potentially negative impact on this practice could be that jobseekers just stop looking at all employment opportunities that involve the charity sector as a whole because they are so used to seeing adverts for volunteers that they automatically disregard them now. This has the potential to have a negative impact on both the jobseeker and the potential employer.
It's for this reason that I think that we either need a filter to filter out voluntary roles, or we need to shift the advertising of voluntary roles away from the very websites that the unemployed are forced to use to demonstrate that they are meeting their commitment of looking for work.
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