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Oleeo’s annual public services recruitment seminar took place on 5 October in London with lots of discussion from attendees and great presentations from industry practitioners. Here’s some of the highlights from the session.

First to talk was Philip Wilson, Chief Psychologist & Chief Assessor at Civil Service Fast Stream & Early Talent who shared insights on how data techniques can help you find the best future leaders for crucial public service roles.

In his talk, Phillip showed how the Civil Service scrutinised multiple datasets to continuously improve its award-winning and industry-leading graduate recruitment operation and make sure they were identifying great, diverse talent. He highlighted how streams of data across the recruitment process were helping the government to enhance talent attraction and build cadence with more candidates, including delivering a greater diversity focus, not solely on gender but also ethnicity, social mobility & disabilitybased.

Data analysis from application data points as well as market research helped the employer to better understand socio-economic trends, and then focus on promoting assets relevant to these audience such as commitment to training and development. By looking at ratios and correlations, the civil service is able to better understand how it is performing against industry averages and this triggers work to make improvements – be this more interactive assessments or the use of video interviews. This also applies to aspects such as measurements, messaging, candidate reach and overall conversion rates. 

Talk to Oleeo to understand how to make best use of your recruitment data

Staying on the data topic, Charles Hipps, Oleeo CEO was next to present. He walked through the best ways that public service resourcing could use AI to improve efficiency and diversity.

Charles shared 5 key benefits of adding AI in recruiting to ensure end-to-end intelligent automation:

1. Break the source of talent wide open and source for hard-to-fill roles
2. Reduce bias & improve diversity hiring
3. Hire faster – engage and influence the best hires before competitors
4. Cut costs and administrative burdens so recruiters focus on what they love
5. Overcome competitor threats and make your business outperforming

Charles showed how this is not just a selection asset, but can also apply to attraction and engagement too. The key, he added is to constantly train & de-bias the algorithms.

Contact us today to find out how Oleeo can help you realise these 5 key transformation goals.

One client on such a transformation journey is Nottinghamshire County Council. Steve Brooks, Team Manager, Recruitment & Business Change, shared insights from a three year journey to moving the council away from paper-reliance to an Oleeo based end-to-end service.

Steve cautioned that transformation is a long process and much harder than one might think, reliant on Lean+ principles to help see the project through. Communication, talking and listening are all very essential with the ability to listen more than you talk vital. Use and learn from feedback with a 5 week window for proper testing, accept that things do occasionally go wrong and bureaucratic approvals are part of the course. Micro-management at the highest level will help make efficiencies easier to spot. For instance, instead of 40 minutes to fill in complex internal forms and go round in circles, automation can get everything done within 10 minutes instead.  

The overall efficiencies realised however are making real differences to the way the council, which serves 817,851 residents, recruits its talent. A streamlined approach yields significant savings for managers – 30 minutes spent on arranging interviews instead of 1.5 hours and eradicates the elapsed two week processing time. Overall the average time to hire is now just under 45 days from vacancy approval to eventual offer – much better than a previous worst case scenario of 6 months and 13 days for social workers. With Oleeo, filling social care posts can take just under 30 days now. References can now be completed in 51 hours instead of up to 36 days. All recruiting data is in one secure place and GDPR complaint. All in all, Oleeo is helping to achieve significant savings to the council without affecting service delivery! 

Learn more about Oleeo for Public Sector Recruiting

The final speaker of the morning was another Oleeo transformation story for Police Job Wales. Tracy Hawthorne, Assistant Director currently seconded to the All Wales HR and LDS Collaboration Project walked attendees through an aggressive 5 month project to get each of the four Welsh police forces to run recruitment in the same way using just one Oleeo system.

The focus was improving customer experience, efficient/timely application and consistency. Each Force recruited differently, most had manual processes. Time from application to assessment centre took up to eight weeks. Forces had different technology; one integrated end to end approach was not an option. In many ways, this project felt as complicated as navigating a London Underground map. System delivery also had to be able to cope with the internal differences between forces, and be capable of balancing the needs of small and big forces alike as well as the Welsh Language Act, integrations for higher education needs and a new behavioural style sift. And it all had to be ready to go live on 24 July. 

Working in close partnership with Oleeo, the team implemented one central system that could work with all four force needs – enabling resilience and business continuity. The forces worked hard on user acceptance testing, designing and amending until it worked for all users. As the partnership with Oleeo progressed, consultation led to the forces identifying new requirements and configuring the system for each force to include small nuances unique to them. This included setting up automated emails to workforce representation groups, auto alerting them if candidates tick that they require positive action or reasonable adjustments. 

Since go-live, the forces & Oleeo have worked together to bring the application and assessment process down from eight weeks to 2 hours in some cases and given a consistent, fast and streamlined process to all applicants – the candidate experience originally envisaged! Information is held on the system in one location as opposed to four and the system can generate instant data/statistics for analytical purposes – this was previously not available.

Learn more about Oleeo for Police Recruiting.

Thank you for reading these highlights. We welcome any feedback you may have.

In the meantime, why not download our latest Guide to Easing Public Service Resourcing Pressures