Digital by Default

Recruiting and Retaining [Public] Service Technologists – beyond improving the salaries

The Centre for British Progress* published this report recommending ways to improve Recruiting and Retaining Civil Service Technologists which I generally like and agree with. It focuses almost exclusively on the issue of the [growing] salary gap between public service digital/design/data/technology roles and their counterparts in the private sector. It makes some sensible recommendations and highlights some of the major issues well (I do think some of it is a bit more nuanced than presented but it broadly smells right.)

While sorting the pay issue is vital I do believe that if the Government is going to come anywhere close to meeting the ambitious target of one in 10 civil servants will work in tech and digital roles within the next five years then there are more changes needed and we are going to have to greatly increase the pool of candidates interested in these roles – rather than the current rob Peter to pay Paul ‘strategy’ and revolving door between in-house and consultant/contractor public service digital workers.

Discovery 

If we want to attract new people then for a start we need to make it easier for them to discover (and understand) the opportunities! Civil Service Jobs just doesn’t meet expectations here – and its recent move to ‘defend’ itself from (I assume) AI bots/scrapers and the like by the addition of the captcha and the self destructing URLs has only made things worse. Surely we want vacancies to be as available to the open web as possible? Not hidden away on a site that is niche at best? A principle of the Indie Web was POSSE (post once, syndicate everywhere) and that seems a no-brainer for job adverts?

Now some Departments have teams working incredibly hard to shine a spotlight on their vacancies but it is hard, there is a lot of competition and the primary home on the web for vacancies should be making things easier not harder.

Insider coded

Even once you do discover the vacancies everything is so insider-coded! The amount of good candidates who bounce off even if they are interested because it all seems so opaque and weighted towards existing civil servants (or people who know someone inside willing to coach them) must be significant if you scale up just the frustrated DMs and emails I get personally.

Success profiles, and particularly the Behaviours, just befuddle people. They do not know how to structure CVs, cover letters or interview answers around them. They don’t understand the weighting of them and why they aren’t talking about specific skills and experiences. Let alone then trying to pretzel themselves into making things fit the STAR method.

There are loads of great examples of well written, specific job descriptions out there – building on the foundations of the wonderful GDAD framework templates by adding context but they remain the exception rather than the rule. Candidates don’t need to get through 800 generic words about your Department, just add a link to that, they want to know what they will be doing in the role, what are the ways of working, what are the expectations. Make it compelling. Link to supporting information – what makes the role/team/work special/important/interesting. Shout it from the rafters.

Applying/Interviewing 

Stop making people copy and paste their CV into terrible systems where they lose the formatting and you can’t preview things properly – or return to them easily after hitting submit. It is fine to provide format guidelines but bloody hell let people work in the editor of their choice and upload a PDF or something!

Make it much clearer of what is expected from applications and provide examples of what good looks like. Stop hiding this information in the depths of the job ad – it shouldn’t be a comprehension test.

The rise of sharing interview questions ahead of time is a positive trend and hopefully this becomes the norm across the sector – because at the moment things are extremely inconsistent. Each Department has its own processes for, and expectations of, candidates even if the roles look the same. While the DDaT/GDAD work has helped there really isn’t any such thing as a Civil Service Technologist – DWP isn’t the same as DBT which is different to DfE who don’t have the same expectations as HMRC…and they are all different to GDS.

The turnaround timeline

One of the biggest issues in getting new people in is it just takes soooooo long. The process from seeing an ad to application to interview to getting an offer to starting can take months even when it all goes smoothly. Now I know there are similar tales of Big Tech recruitment being a drag but with the best will in the world people might be more inclined to hang on from £200k or whatever. That is not who we are competing with. It isn’t just the time – it is also the radio silence when you are waiting. It is hard not to get twitchy and I have known people who apply for other roles while in this limbo even after accepting an offer and go through the entire process and start elsewhere while still waiting.

Again some teams in some Departments are doing interesting experiments to  improve things but these are still pretty rare.

Much of this is to do with security vetting and I’m not going to get into that too deeply other than to say Basic (BPSS) vetting is FAST these days so the issue is more that we need more challenge on just whether quite so many roles need the more time consuming Security Check (SC) because at some point in the last decade it just became the default and it gums up the entire system.

Location strategy 

Let the financial institutions and law firms drag their staff back to the offices and embrace the ability to work remotely as a real benefit contrasting from elsewhere in the market rather than falling in line and losing out on great people who don’t live near the assigned office location for that team.

Invest in the community 

I firmly believe that the best reason to work in ‘public service digital’ is the strength and generosity of the community. Across Departments, into Local Gov, internationally, with NGOs and ALBs it always feels like people have your back, are ready to share their knowledge (or just lend an ear) and just get stuck in. Over time though this has been left to side of desk efforts and individuals to maintain the networks and communities. It has been undervalued and abandoned by the powers that be when actually it is the superpower of the sector and the best way to offer a differentiator. 

So I got that off my chest 😂

Spending 10 years doing a jobs newsletter – launched because of frustrations about being able to recruit into the Civil Service – without seeing things substantially improve has left me with a lot of opinions and a few ideas I guess. 

Fingers crossed some of these things improve so I don’t write another post in another decade (as I’ll be real old by then!)

*I’m not sure what to think about the Centre for British Progress – it is a terrible name that triggers all sorts of concerns but from what I can tell they are at least Lawful Neutral.

Matt Jukes

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5 responses to “Recruiting and Retaining [Public] Service Technologists – beyond improving the salaries”

  1. I’m going (mildly) disagree about the copy and pasting CV thing.

    Most people suck at writing a CV. Almost none of them target it to the job application at hand. Reading through a multi-page & poorly typeset CV isn’t a sensible use of a recruiters time.

    I once read a CV from a senior leader which spend several paragraphs talking about his summer job 20 years ago. Bollocks to that. Make a form that only allows, say, the previous 5 jobs. Or the last 6 years. Or whatever.

    Having a bunch of little boxes with specifically designed questions is much better for all concerned. If a key requirement of the job is that the applicant knows Excel – make a box which says “Tell us about your Excel experience”. That way the recruiter doesn’t have to read an interminable essay to discover the one nugget they’re looking for.

    You’re spot on about everything else though.

  2. CSJ doesn’t do that anymore though – it literally makes you paste your whole CV in to one big, plain text box and the same with the cover letter.

    Thats why I said provide formatting rules.

    I don’t mind the questions – though I still think it should be easier to preview what you’ve actually written!

  3. It’s amazing to me that the problems you outline (and the solutions) are mirrored so closely across the Atlantic at federal, state, and local levels in the U.S. We have all these issues, too.

    • The discovery problem is very real. We have to pay for both LinkedIn Recruiter and the LinkedIn job posting service to get the word out there. But major job boards like Indeed.com are doing away with free listings. So to get the word out you have to pay, pay, pay. And we struggle to get the budget for it because most government agencies do not have (a) the turnover we see in the tech field, and (b) the need to actively recruit.
    • As for insider-coding, we’ve mostly fixed that. We’ve tried to make internal titles match the private sector where possible. But when we can’t do that, we actually post jobs with a “public facing title” and include the internal title in small print for reference. We use LLMs to find the most popular and common titles for roles so that when we do post, the right people are more likely to stumble across them.
    • Sadly, we still have the applicant tracking system (ATS) problem, where applicants are forced to fill out forms with data from their CV. It’s slow and cumbersome, even with AI ingestion tools. We do it because there’s a belief that if a candidate lies on our form, it’s a legally-actionable lie, but if they lie on their own resume/CV, it’s not legally actionable. This is a dumb notion most likely pushed by the folks selling ATS packages. But HR folks seem to believe it.
    • On the matter of turnaround time, my specific agency only gets to hire once per month, through a vote of our governance board. So that sucks. But we do our best to (a) align hiring to that timeline, and (b) clearly communicate the entirely predictable delays to candidates so they are not surprised. Hiring can still take 2-3 months from “let’s hire” to “started,” but we stay transparent and that’s made a huge difference.
    • As for interviewing, we ban all those obnoxious “trick questions” or “wacky puzzles” that are used by Google or other tech titans that are completely useless in determining whether someone is a good fit. We also hold interview rounds to 3 phases: (a) intro call, (b) interview 1, (c) interview 2. None of this 4, 5, 6, 7 rounds of interviews nonsense.
    • Also on the matter of job posting and interviewing, we ask hiring managers do it all directly. HR can get involved in edge cases, or to help with cold recruiting, but for the most part we put candidates in contact with the hiring manager and related team members immediately. It’s more work for the manager, but it gets mad respect from candidates.
    • Finally, we work hard to balance pay, benefits, and mission messaging when promoting our roles so candidates know they will be compensated fairly overall (our benefits are better than our pay), and joining us should be a conscious choice to join a team on a mission.

    With all these improvements over the last few years, our “batting average” in hiring has jumped dramatically. I would bet my own batting average over the past 2-3 years (for making great hires) is around .750 or higher.

    Digital government leaders need to take as much charge as they can over this process. Make it real, make it meaningful for everyone.