Published: Local Government IT in Use, 31st January 2008

Local government needs to urgently update its recruitment processes to cope with a future where retiring baby boomers and declining numbers of skilled young people will put talent in short supply, says Richard Tyrie, co-founder of JGP.co.uk and jobsgopublic.com.

 

Local government is facing a recruitment time bomb. One that must be defused over the next few years, otherwise its traditional organisational structures, operating costs and, most of all, the delivery of public services, could come under considerable pressure; perhaps even collapse.

 

The reason for this? It’s the end of the baby boomers’ working lives. Nearly one third of local government staff are scheduled to retire in the next ten years. This unprecedented loss of senior and highly knowledgeable talent will clearly have a number of serious service repercussions without long range planning.

 

Firstly, local authorities will have to build new recruitment programmes to make up for the shortfall in numbers unless, of course, they wish to engage retiring staff as consultants. Secondly, employers will have to ensure that there is adequate knowledge transfer, avoiding serious ‘corporate memory loss’. This is vital since local government has gone through considerable change in recent years responding to the local e-gov, efficiency and transformation agendas - all against a backdrop of tighter spending rounds. Thirdly, in the age of the internet and globalisation, and faced with unprecedented competition for skilled and lower paid work in Britain, public sector employers will have to turn themselves into ‘employer brands’ attracting, communicating with and nurturing potential employees through every channel at their disposal, including search engines and social media environments.

 

While we are seeing the first signs of local authorities or Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) like the Audit Commission adopting tactics such as posting recruitment focused videos on YouTube, there are more fundamental changes that need to be made.

 

Most public sector organisations (and many private ones too) need to set up effective ways to communicate meaningfully with potential candidates and job seekers, whether email and telephone enquiries from school leavers or feedback from candidates’ interviews. Employers must use this information to nurture the next wave of potential employees - be they social carers, architects, teachers or chief executives. This ‘fight for talent’ is critical since the numbers of available candidates - particularly in younger age groups – will decline heavily from now on.

 

There is nevertheless a huge opportunity for local government. As local authorities streamline and e-enable revenue collection and service delivery to create efficient ‘One Touch’ citizen services, it must not overlook the considerable cost savings to be made from streamlining and enhancing core recruitment processes. For example, local authorities can reduce ongoing expenditure on recruitment advertising by re-engineering systems such that prospective staff are kept engaged and informed through dedicated websites. Moreover, they can closely target key workers through specialist trade publications or targeted microsites within their main web pages to create talent pools offering benefits to both council and prospective employee.

 

This is a long way off for many employers. Indeed to date, the furthest that councils have generally ‘reached out’ to job seekers and candidates is to post vacancies to ‘job boards’, with little thought to the online environments these people frequent or social networks they belong to.

 

Public sector employers need to make headway in working out their future employment needs and recruiting processes – especially paper based ones. They must filter in more strategic, web based recruitment solutions that can operate across whole authorities to harness the impact of different media and/or social networking channels in targetting different age groups.

 

Authorities that become the attractive ‘employer brands’ will edge out competitors – whether another UK local authority or one on the other side of the world. This isn’t simply the language of the internet, either. The figures are stark. Only two percent of London boroughs’ staff are under 25. Unless local government reaches out to the ‘Facebook’ generation, it will fail to attract job seekers and candidates for the future and eventually lose out to other employers as they engage this generation to become ‘the employer of choice’.

 

“Our search engine marketing campaign has been a huge success and has consistently achieved a very high click through rate delivering quality graduates to the local government talent pool, directing candidates to a range of council job opportunities and raising awareness of local government as an employer of choice.”

Liz Copeland, Consultant,
Talent Management, Improvement and Development Agency

 

Online communities attract people with similar interests, demographics, and backgrounds; a recruiter’s dream. The ability to target an employment opportunity and tailor the message to a specific demographic is very powerful. Indeed, there is no better alternative to using the internet as the means to become an employer of choice. As the IDeA’s recent successful search engine marketing campaign for IDeA Talent Management proves: harnessing web technology can bring significant rewards when it comes to nurturing talent.

 

As the Gershon screw tightens on budgets council-wide, the pressure is on to account for every penny; to ensure recruitment campaigns are justified, that they prove a return on investment, and that they can attract the best talent into the future. It’s time to strategically defuse the recruitment time bomb.

 

About JGP
JGP is a leading provider of web-based talent management solutions to not for profit and public sector organisations. Focused on delivering online candidate management and recruitment solutions, JGP serves over 1,000 customers in the public and not for profit sectors, helping organisations reduce recruitment costs and time to hire by as much as 80 percent.

 

To find out more about JGP please contact:
Haylee Corfield Tel: 020 7923 5643 Email: haylee.corfield@jgp.co.uk

 

www.jgp.co.uk