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.
Media Average number of applications per advertising source
APSjobs 17
Seek 16
Australian 13
Canberra Times 8
Mycareer 6
  • 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.
Media Number of job offers for each advertising source (survey responses)
APSjobs 219 from 4798 (4.6%)
Seek 67 from 1488 (4.5%)
Australian 8 from 175 (4.6%)
Canberra Times 17 from 322 (5.3%)
Mycareer 2 from 72 (2.8%)

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).

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