PSMAC Subcommittee on People Resourcing
Executive Summary: Report at a Glance
In March 2010, a subcommittee of the Public Service Management Advisory Committee (PSMAC) was established to examine issues and challenges regarding people resourcing in the public service. The Subcommittee quickly agreed that "people resourcing" is a wider lens than "staffing." It is a continuum of activities by which people enter, move around within, and leave the public service. A schematic can be found in Appendix A.
The Subcommittee gathered and examined data regarding people resourcing and has included a compendium to this report as Appendix A to foster further evidence-based discussion.
The Subcommittee set as its overall objective "to efficiently and effectively place the right people in the right jobs at the right time." It then reached out to gather the perspectives of human resources (HR) advisors, managers and employees in order to assess current people resourcing across the public service—where it is working well, where it falls short of an optimal system, and where there are priority issues to be tackled. The methodology and details of the engagement are set out in Appendix B.
The engagement revealed, and the Subcommittee acknowledges, that the context for people resourcing is far from static. It is still being affected by the 2003 Public Service Modernization Act (PSMA), by the sustained focus on public service renewal over the past several years, and by recent changes to the machinery of government in this area. There are important pockets of innovation across the public service. Aspects of the people resourcing continuum have been the subject of detailed and useful scrutiny, such as integrated planning, the possibilities of new Web‑based technologies, and post-secondary recruitment. Other important exercises are under way, including the administrative services review, a review of the PSMA, and an examination of the organization of work. This Subcommittee aspires to offer a picture of people resourcing that can complement and perhaps influence these other exercises.
The Subcommittee concludes that the most important gaps to be tackled are as follows:
- Continued weakness in planning by many departments and agencies that has yet to fully capture the links between identification of current and future business needs, assessment of current workforce composition, and concrete people resourcing strategies;
- The lack of basic tools and common processes by which sub-organizations within and especially across departments and agencies can combine their resourcing activities for greater effectiveness at lower cost;
- A yawning gap of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the management community and the human resources community, stemming from lack of clarity about expectations, roles and risk tolerance, which is feeding a cumulative pattern of risk aversion and inefficiency; and
- A credibility gap between the rhetoric of public service branding and the real experience of would-be entrants.
These gaps can be closed; the Subcommittee provides recommendations to the deputy heads who will drive people management in each organization and to the Centre.See footnote[1]
The key recommendations are as follows:
- Deputy heads should lead, and be seen to lead, serious engagement with their management teams in crafting each year's integrated business/HR plans, and should insist on regular reporting and forecasting that connects the silos of salary budgets, "body counts" and space allocation;
- Deputy heads should ensure a serious and authentic discussion within their respective organizations to clarify the expectations, roles and accountabilities of hiring managers and human resources, and insist on codifying these roles and responsibilities and setting baseline service standards as a starting point for further collaboration;
- Deputy heads must drive, and be seen to drive, the swift adoption of the emerging Common Human Resources Business Process and common interoperable information technology (IT), and stamp out any drift into customized processes and systems. The Centre should mandate this convergence and cease creating its own customized applications;
- The Centre should use off-the-shelf Web 2.0 platforms to accelerate the efficient interdepartmental sharing of integrated business/HR plans. The same technology will enable the sharing of best practices and resourcing and staffing tools (job descriptions, selection tools, interview guides, etc.) for hiring managers and HR advisors. This will help stop spending scarce operating resources on "reinventing the wheel;"
- The Centre should use off-the-shelf Web 2.0 platforms to create an interdepartmental "marketplace" where departments can identify their proposed resourcing activities before formally launching a staffing process; to look at priority referrals and pre-qualified candidates created by activities elsewhere in the public service; and to look for opportunities to combine efforts with other organizations with similar needs;
- Shared resourcing processes within and across departments should steadily become the norm from which exceptions are rare and difficult to obtain, especially for resourcing in the small set of occupational groups and levels that currently account for most resourcing activities. Managers should be expected to use them, and departments should be expected to collaborate. To this end, the Centre should encourage further work on tools that pre-screen large pools of candidates to obtain smaller numbers in which hiring managers can have confidence and from which they can quickly select candidates who fit;
- The Centre and departments must take steps together to slow down the churn (excessive mobility) and shortages within the HR community and to foster professional development and adaptation to new tools and approaches; and
- External recruitment should be more candid about the likely number of hires. There is no evidence that there will be a lack of good external candidates, except in some niches. The public service should aspire not just to being an "employer of choice" but also to being "a choosy employer" that seeks people who aspire to excellence and to making a difference. Efforts to attract new recruits should be targeted based on real job opportunities rather than on recruiting for the public service in general.
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