Five reasons why it’s time to rethink your public sector recruitment

The delivery of council services relies on having the right people in the right jobs. But at a time of high demand and churn of people in local government the cost and effectiveness of finding and placing people is an increasing concern.

At a recent workshop that we hosted in London, local government recruiters told us how and why they are rethinking recruitment. Here’s what we learned.

Employer brand is key to cutting costs and improving candidate quality

In a tight recruitment market where supply is short of demand and competition for quality candidates fierce, employers must present a compelling case to attract talented and experienced employees. This is especially true for hard to fill roles such as those in social care and executive-level hires.

Traditionally councils have relied on agencies to find quality candidates in sufficient volume to fulfill hard to fill roles. Similarly, many councils depend on executive search agencies to fill experienced hires, like in-house lawyers or executive posts.

To attract candidates directly without agency intervention, councils can make significant savings by building their reputation as an employer of choice among current and prospective employees. Focusing on a high quality candidate recruitment experience from beginning to end forms a key part of this as this is where potential recruits can leak out of the recruitment process.

You can’t improve recruitment performance without measuring what’s working

It’s unusual now for councils not to have targets around their recruitment.

These might be quantitative measures such as the diversity of candidates or the number of local recruits, qualitative goals such as candidate experience or assessing how they are meeting national goals.

Equally important, is the need for councils to pin down where and why they are spending money on recruitment.

The absence of clear management information around recruitment performance is the biggest barrier to identifying areas for improvement, and investment is an impossible task. A strategic approach must start with ensuring they have full visibility of the performance of their recruitment supply chain.

To control spend, HR needs to control the recruitment process from beginning to end

When it comes to keeping a lid on recruitment costs, councils face pressures on a number of fronts.

On one side, hiring managers might recruit ‘off-contract’ with unapproved partners. A single preferred recruitment supplier might put forward their own candidates first and with some agencies dealing with hard-to-fill or high volume roles, it is not unheard of for agencies to hold back workers to extract more money.

The way to avoid this is to adopt a “neutral vendor” model which moves away from monopolistic tie-ins with a sole supplier or exclusive arrangements with specialists. This allows you to bring competition and greater visibility into your recruitment supply chain and managing recruitment digitally can give you the end-to-end control of the process.

Digital recruitment cuts risks and the burden of compliance

When HMRC request evidence for off contract spend or IR35 tax compliance do you have a report that can be tracked and audited? Many councils that work directly with recruitment agencies or through other managed service providers are working with paper based systems, that do not enable them to produce a report, without spending a huge amount of resource pulling the information together or are unable to report it at all.

It’s a similar story with pre-employment checks. Hiring managers with the responsibility for ensuring pre-employment checks often say it places undue pressure on their time. Delegation of this responsibility to certain managed service providers can be problematic as most retrospectively audit a sample of compliance checks on a six monthly basis. This means a non-compliant worker could be in post for several months before the problem is detected.

Where technology based systems are used to drive and monitor recruitment processes compliance reports are available at the click of a button. This not only provides hiring managers with peace of mind but also frees up time for HR and procurement to focus on reducing spend and build employer brand.

Changing recruitment process isn’t as painful as you think

In spite of all the benefits of rethinking recruitment, aversion to risk and change is still a major factor holding councils back from doing things differently.

In reality, well-managed change can deliver major business benefits with minimal risk – provided you manage it in the right way.

The key is involving hiring managers and those who have a stake in improving recruitment early on, talking to them about the benefits and listening to them about their needs. Piloting the change in a discrete area before rolling out across the entire organisation allows you to assess which areas need improvement as well as examples of success. Small investments of time in communication and involvement will make the switch to a new recruitment approach painless.

Overall, however, the message from the local government HR practitioners at our workshop was that when weighing up the benefit of switching to a new recruitment approach by far the greater risk is to change nothing. Traditional practices will not achieve cost savings, guarantee compliance or encourage innovation necessary to attract top talent in an increasingly competitive recruitment market.