Regarding the private job application centers ...

I remember it was a big discussion here in Norway some decades ago. The state job application center had a monopoly on the task of connecting people with jobs. I thought that it was silly - there should not be any need for regulations forbidding private job application centers, if the government agency can do it for free and they do a good enough job on that, there would not be a market for private job application centers.

Eventually the regulations were removed. Fast forward a couple of decades, and while I still think the same, I can see that the growth of private job application institutions has grown. I believe this growth has not been a good thing.

There are three different kind of companies out there, it's the temp staffing firms like Adecco, there are the database providers, such as finn.no, and there are the head hunting companies. I don't think we should need those companies.

Now, instead of checking one database, job applicants should search and monitor several services to make sure they catch all the relevant job applications. At the same time, an employer looking for the perfect candidate for a position has to post ads in multiple databases to make sure they find all the relevant candidates. Competition are usually a good thing, but sometimes it can be pretty counter-productive.

Why do those companies thrive?

As for the temp staffing, it may be because of law regulations, it can be risky to hire people permanently (as one is pretty well protected against being sacked in Norway), and the laws are very restrictive on temporary hires ... so why not rent people instead of hire them?

As for the databases, I believe one simple reason may be bad associations with the government brand. It used to be one governmental organization specifically working on matching unemployed people with employers looking for people, eventually they gradually became more of the agency paying out doles to people, eventually several governmental organizations dealing with social security got merged into one - so now it's the social security organization that runs the official state-driven job application/position database. While I believe the database engine itself is good (I haven't actively been using it for a couple of decades though), I can see that companies needing a skilled workforce may want to put their ads somewhere else than in the social welfare database - people living on social benefits are generally not considered to be the best workers.

I also think there is a lot of corruption going on, as many state organizations are hiring people from the temp staff companies and putting their job announcements in private databases rather than the public database.