Introduction

In recent years, employer engagement in employment and social services has received increasing attention from both researchers and policymakers, especially regarding how this can provide disadvantaged groups of unemployed individuals with relevant training and subsequent employment. The discussion focuses largely on either conceptualizing and mapping employers’ willingness to engage in employment services for disadvantaged groups (Idowu et al, 2015; Bredgaard, 2018) or examining how employers can be made more socially responsible for broader social or environmental issues (for an overview, see Aguinis and Glavas, 2012; Barnett et al, 2020; see also the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR)). However, as pointed out in some of recent studies on CSR, less attention has been paid to the micro-processes of how to make employers socially responsible (Barnett et al, 2020), which also seems to be the case in the literature on employer engagement in employment and social services.

In this chapter, we intend to open up this black box of employer engagement by examining the day-to-day work of the staff in public employment services (PES) working in the area of employer engagement. The point of departure for this analysis is Danish employment policies and their implementation in municipal jobcentres. We examine how employer engagement is created, developed and maintained at the street level of local employment services. We set out with an understanding of employer engagement as ‘the active involvement of employers in addressing the societal challenge of promoting the labour-market participation of vulnerable groups’ (van Berkel et al, 2017, p 505). Employer engagement not only entails employers being socially responsible on paper; it involves the employing organizations as a whole: managers on all levels, supervisors, HR staff, union representatives, employees and others.

In particular, we analyse how the public authorities involve employers in the work of helping those unemployed individuals who have social, mental and physical challenges interact with employers and their organizations. In doing so, we elaborate on existing conceptualizations of employer engagement and link employer engagement to the aims of strengthening the ability of the disadvantaged unemployed to work.