How The Australian Public Service Commission Sources Talent

The Australian Public Service Commission (APS) released stage one of a report which evaluated recruitment advertising activities across different agencies.

Some interesting results:

• Data collection – Of the 104 FMA agencies only 45 FMA agencies collected source-of-hire data (Only those who collected data were included in the evaluation). Not surprisingly data collection problems exist  – “Response to the evaluation survey suggests that those agencies that utilise an e-recruitment system were able to provide detailed survey responses more efficiently than those agencies that had to manually check through paper files. There was also anecdotal evidence that an e-recruitment system, however, does not ensure accuracy of applicant information. An agency advised that applicants appeared to be selecting the first item on a drop-down list of advertisement sources”
• Source of Hire: APSJobs (the online job board operated by APS) and the Internet delivered the most number of new applicants; but Print channels are not too far behind. The consensus is that online channels offered the most value for money.

• Quality of Hire: Interestingly, when it comes to quality of hire, all media channels performed equally well with 4.6% of job offers coming from APSjobs; 4.4% from internet advertising; and 4.5% from print advertising.

It is never going to be easy to monitor and collect accurate data for a large entity which employs 162,009 staff; besides, APS is going through a period of change. In fact, only 8% of the agencies under the APS have a formal talent management plan, while only 32% conducts workforce planning.

Yet, kudos to the APS for the deliberate effort to improve the monitoring and collection of recruitment data. In their own words  – “The Commission will also continue to assess ways of improving source-of-hire data collection”.

As I have been always arguing – you can’t improve what you don’t measure (or don’t know).

(PS: The APS made references to the work we did on the Source of Talent Report and the Job Board Report).