Oleeo hosted its annual Future of Public Services Recruitment Breakfast Seminar on 18 October 2019 in London. This is a roundup of the discussions from the morning.
- Understanding the hiring challenges impacting public service talent acquisition teams
Leatham Green, Executive Director of the Public Services People Managers Association was the opening speaker for the seminar unveiling new research conducted with Oleeo and WiredGov, the official UK government news alerting service. Download your copy at https://info.oleeo.com/publicsurvey.
Leatham looked at some of the headline findings of the report including how talent scarcity, budget constraints, competition from the private sector and time to hire are the major concerns amongst recruiters in the public sector. He offered best practice advice at ways of getting around these hurdles, as well as some of the other challenges identified in the paper.
- New insights technology to help proactively address the survey findings
Oleeo’s Head of UK Sales Patrik Heggberg unveiled new reporting offerings that will help to address some of the survey findings using real-time data visualisation. He showcased Oleeo Talent Insights, new dashboard technology that provides strategic insights to drive resourcing & measure performance against recruitment SLA’s. Download an information sheet at https://info.oleeo.com/talentinsights.
Patrik showed how the technology offers recruiters intuitive data visualisation dashboards that allow for easy monitoring of recruiting & hiring funnels which can be analysed to spot trends and know which parts of talent acquisition were running effectively and if they are performing on track.
- Working together to improve efficiency and costs within the recruitment process in Wales forces
Providing a police perspective, Tracy Hawthorne, Assistant Director – Seconded to the All Wales HR & LDS Collaboration Project gave a talk on how she has unified four forces onto one system to combat some of the challenges highlighted by the earlier research.
Tracy shared how key to bringing on board stakeholders from all four forces to use one system has been to emphasise efficiencies that can be gleaned to make recruitment easier across Wales. This includes showing major improvements including an average time of less than an hour between candidates responding to an advert to being assessment centre ready – instead of the 3 weeks lag from older processes. In certain campaigns, recruitment now takes no longer than 9 days and cost per application has fallen by over 80%,
- The importance of employer branding and candidate experience in the public sector
The final talk of the day came from Carl Du Plessis, a seasoned public sector HR recruiter who most recently was HR Transformation Lead at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, where Oleeo is being deployed to replace Trac as an ATS.
In his talk, Carl reflected on the survey findings earlier and gave his take on how public services recruiters can tackle some of the barriers identified including being more open to looking at wider sources to address talent scarcity and not seeing the private sector as a competitor, but an inspiration for better attraction techniques. Thinking outside of the norm was essential to being an effective employer of choice, he stressed. This extends to what you look for in technology partners and finding innovation that will help facilitate HR transformation in a way that betters what you have today.
