Project Description: Increasing employment opportunities for jobseekers and improving the matching between job vacancies and workers are primary goals of EU labour market policies. At national level, one of the top policy goals is to allocate the right jobs to the right people. The EU-funded HECAT project is developing new technology to support labour market decision-making. A new user experience platform will build on existing basic algorithmic techniques used by some European public employment systems administrations to deliver labour market insights directly to unemployed citizens, and so is built on European values of open data, collaboration, transparency and citizen participation. By focusing on job quality and sustainable employment, the project will bring insight to policymakers.
Funding: The HECAT Project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under grant agreement No 870702 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/870702
Project Partners
South East Technological University
Ireland
Copenhagen Business School
Denmark
Sciences Po | FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
France
Jozef Stefan Institute | INSTITUT JOZEF STEFAN
Slovenia
Tecnalia | FUNDACTION TECNALIA RESEARCH & INNOVATION
Spain
Employment Service of Slovenia | ZAVOD REPUBLIKE SLOVENIJE ZA ZAPOSLOVANJE
Slovenia
Roskilde University | ROSKILDE UNIVERSITET
Denmark
University of Ljubljana | UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
Slovenia
Platform Network for Jobs
Switzerland
Where are we located?
Project Aims
Hecat aims to investigate, demonstrate and pilot a disruptive technology to support labour market decision making by unemployed citizens and those seeking to help them. At one stage or another, almost half of all EU citizens will rely on Public Employment Services (PES), and so this is a key touchpoint of a contemporary state and has impacts on citizen’s thinking about social cohesion, care and existential wellbeing. The ambition of the project is to improve citizen’s experience and outcomes of unemployment by offering real-time evidence-based insight into their personal position in the labour market. Hecat builds on the experience and learning of existing basic algorithmic techniques used by some European PES administrations to:
- deliver labour market insight directly to unemployed citizens and so is built on European values of open data, collaboration, transparency and citizen-participation
- broaden out the focus on the number of jobs drawn from the ‘economic imagination’ to add a focus on job quality and sustainable employment
- go beyond profiling the ‘stock’ unemployed people, to incorporate measures of labour demand, and so take a labour market approach
- go beyond the profiling of ‘problem categories’ of citizens that current survey-data based systems use, to exploit emerging big-data processing and analytics to treat each individual as a unique complex subject in a real-time and near-limitless database that leverages the insight trapped inside statistical agencies
- frame the development in deep contextual insight into the origin and transformation of the experience of unemployment and its administration based on anthropological inquiry
- bring this insight into the hands of decision-makers with a platform
- UX that exploits novel artificial intelligence with learning capabilities and cutting edge, accessible visualisation and gamification techniques to support knowledge discovery and decision making at the critical moment, as a decision support system
HECAT Partners
SETU (formerly WIT) is coordinating the Hecat project. Bringing more than 8 years of experience in the study of unemployment from the Waterford Unemployment Experiences Research Collaborative (WUERC). WIT's approach is person centred, and emphasises that research must be done with the unemployed, rather than on them.
Institutional lead: Ray Griffin, Principal Investigator. Contact: ray.griffin@setu.ie 
With the growth of algorithmic profiling systems and big data, it has become increasingly necessary for us to develop an understanding of these systems which is nuanced and holistic. CBS contributes this understanding to our project through an analysis of labour market metricisation.
Institutional lead: Janine Leschke. Contact: jle.msc@cbs.dk 
Sciences Po is ensuring that our project is sociologically led by maintaining a focus on the experiences of unemployed people. This perspective is different than (for example) studying unemployment through institutions or statistics. This will ensure that the final tool we produce will have the context of the lived experiences of unemployment embedded within it.
Institutional lead: Didier Demaziere. Contact: didier.demaziere@sciencespo.fr 
JSI brings a sophisticated and rich analysis of statistical modelling and data processing to the Hecat project. JSI will help us bring our sociologically led vision of an unemployment support tool to life. This involves not only analysis and critique of existing support tools, but the know-how and skill to build a tool with a different focus to what is already available.
Institutional lead: Pavle Boskoski. Contact: pavle.boskoski@ijs.si 
Tecnalia is working closely with JSI to build a platform which is engaging, intuitive, and useful to the end users. Their efforts are therefore concentrated on the final user experience, and Tecnalia has an important role not only in developing this user interface, but field testing it so that the final result is accessible and useful.
Institutional lead: Jorge Garcia Valbuena. Contact: Jorge.Garcia@tecnalia.com 
One of the most exciting aspects of H2020 projects is being able to work directly with partners who are on the front lines of contemporary issues. We aim to pilot our tool in Slovenia and are working closely with ESS, who have supplied us with invaluable data, information, and resources about the nature and scope of unemployment in Slovenia.
Institutional lead: Tjaša Fužir Koporec. Contact: tjasa.fuzirkoporec@ess.gov.si 
Roskilde are working with Tecnalia to pilot and validate the platform at various phases of its implementation. To achieve this, Roskilde will be collecting feedback from a variety of sample users on the performance of the platform, and working with Tecnalia to incorporate this feedback into future iterations. This ensures that the platform will be valid after the project ends by working through unforeseen issues before the platform goes to final deployment.
Institutional lead: Magnus Paulsen Hansen Contact: mapaha@ruc.dk 
While Sciences Po and WIT add the sociological imagination to the project, UL adds the economists perspective. This grounds our sociologically driven analysis in a structured and nuanced understanding of market systems. This broader picture is essential for a holistic understanding of unemployment.
Institutional lead: Marko Pahor Contact: marko.pahor@ef.uni-lj.si
NFJ offers a wide ranging and contextual understanding of unemployment through the collection of survey data. This will give us a clearer picture of the issues facing unemployed people and will add a huge body of data to the smaller quantities of qualitative data collected by the other partners.
Institutional lead: Roxana Paz. Contact: info@networking-for-jobs.ch 
The HECAT Project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under grant agreement No 870702