#188 2013 · UK Jobcentre Plus / Behavioural Insights Team · Public sector / employment servicesredesign-the-moment
Jobcentres kept asking what jobseekers had already done, so the questions were easy to fudge and impossible to act on
the problem
A recurring check-in process only verified past compliance, giving staff no lever to actually change what happened next
background
Jobcentre Plus's standard fortnightly jobseeker sign-on asked claimants a backward-looking question: had they completed at least three job-search activities in the past two weeks? The question was easy to answer vaguely, easy to forget the details of, and gave the advisor conducting the check-in nothing to do except verify a box had technically been ticked — no mechanism existed to actually shape what the jobseeker would do differently before the next appointment.
The Behavioural Insights Team piloted an alternative at Loughton Jobcentre in Essex: rather than continue reviewing the past fortnight, advisors would have claimants set out specific job-search activities for the coming fortnight, verbalize the plan out loud, and tie it concretely to their actual daily routine, with claimants still struggling after eight weeks additionally supported through expressive-writing and strengths-identification exercises aimed at building psychological resilience.
the move
The pilot replaced the backward-looking compliance question with a forward-looking, written commitment device: claimants stated exactly what they would do over the next two weeks, discussed it with an advisor, and returned to report on and revise that specific plan rather than simply confirming a generic activity count after the fact.
the payoff
In the initial trial, jobseekers who received the new commitment-device approach were 15-20% more likely to be off benefits within 13 weeks of signing on; a subsequent stepped-wedge controlled trial scaled the intervention to 88,033 participants across 12 Jobcentres (following a 2,383-person pilot at a single site) and confirmed a significant increase in the rate at which claimants exited benefits.
what came after
The Behavioural Insights Team trained roughly 25,000 Job Advisors on the approach, and the commitment-device format developed at Loughton was rolled out to every Jobcentre in the United Kingdom, becoming a standard reference case in behavioural public policy for how reframing a compliance check as a forward commitment can outperform monitoring alone.
references
- [1]Behavioural insight and the labour market: evidence from a pilot study and a large stepped-wedge controlled trialJournal of Public Policy (Cambridge University Press), 2019cambridge.org
- [2]Behavioural Insights Team (2013). Job Centre RCT for Employment SeekingBehavioral Science & Policy Association (besci.org), 2013besci.org