Firm recruitment and public employment services in Italy: how the length of searching affects job matching

State employment agencies, referred to as Job Centres (JC), arrange a limited share of overall job matches in the Italian labour market. Since 1997, a progressive reform of public employment service (PES) regulations has restructured JC role as a job matching-oriented function. In this paper we analyse labour demand by considering the job offers registered at the JC. More specifically, we investigate if the time required by the search process arranged by public employment operators influences the probability that the matching process is concluded successfully. We focus on the search duration by the JC, rather than the vacancy duration, to test whether the former plus other characteristics of the vacancy position have effect on a successful job matching process. We use survival analysis to estimate the cumulative incidence when the event of interest is employment, assuming that both employed and unemployed job searchers are engaged in the matching process.