Thesis (MPA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2017 / In the pre-democratic era, recruitment and selection practices in South Africa were generally based on segregationist policies and legislation that reserved most skilled jobs for white employees. The post 1994 Constitution brought a new dimension by introducing principles that promote fair, non-bias, objective and equitable recruitment. The motivation is derived from section 195 1 (i) of the Constitution of Republic of South Africa of 1996 which states that employment of personnel should be fair, without prejudice, objective and should represent the demographics of South Africa. Section 195 (i) stipulates that the employment of personnel should be “…based on ability, objectivity, fairness, and the need to redress the imbalance of the past…”. The Public Service Act 103 of 1994, section 11 stipulates that in the filling of posts in the public service due consideration must be given to democratic values and principles, and appointments should be based on qualifications, skills and competencies. Furthermore, the Public Service Regulation 2001 states that the persons who are recommended for appointment in a position must have the necessary skills and competencies, and that the process must be fair and unbiased. Equally, the Employment Equity Act (1998) prohibits discrimination in employment that is based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, etc. Within this context, the aim of the study was to determine if the Mpumalanga Department of Human Settlements adheres to ethics in its recruitment and selection processes as stipulated by various legislations. The ethics would include recruiting and selecting people with relevant qualifications, skills, and competencies in a fair and unbiased manner by following the right procedures. Relying on a mixed methods research design, the study used interviews and questionnaires to elicit data from 50 employees in the Mpumalanga Department of Human Settlements. The study found that the MDHS had policies and strategies to promote ethics in its recruitment and selection processes; although these were hampered by weak implementation efforts. Incidents of favouritism, nepotism, political interference and lack of confidentiality were experienced in recruitment and selection of employees. In some cases, appointed candidates lacked the necessary skills and qualifications. Given this, it was recommended, inter alia, that implementation of ethics policies and strategies should be improved to ensure integrity and compliance in recruitment and selection processes within the MDHS environment.

Sweden has once been an emigration country, but as the years went by and as the world is in constant change, it turned into an immigration country. One of the most debated questions politically and economically is the employment gap between immigrants and natives. The available studies have mainly described the employment gap between immigrants and natives by human capital factors and discrimination on the labour market. The goal of this paper is to discover the correlation between the local factors and the employment gap between European, non-European immigrants and natives, on municipality level while controlling for education level and gender. Using data from Statistics Sweden and SKR, and an OLS multiple linear regression, we could capture this effect. The local factors studied are the unemployment rate, share of immigrants, share of low-skilled jobs and the size of the municipality. The overall results suggest that the region of birth does have an impact on the employment gap between immigrants and natives, where the biggest gap is between the non-European immigrants and the natives, which is in line with previous studies. Furthermore, both Europeans’ and non-Europeans’ employment rate is mostly correlated with the municipality size followed by the local unemployment rate. Taking the limitations of this paper into account, these results are only an indication and further studies need to be made to further insure the correlation between the local factors and the employment rate.