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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