Recommendation 2

The time taken to recruit staff across the civil service is too slow. It takes an average of 99 days to hire new staff in the civil service, from the job being advertised to completing basic pre-employment checks. Completing security checks for new recruits can take on average an additional 171 days for candidates requiring the highest level of security clearance. The Cabinet Office acknowledges that civil service recruitment times are slow, particularly compared with private sector firms, and asserts that it is confident these can be reduced. Recruitment times vary across departments, but departmental data on recruitment and security vetting times are patchy and inconsistent, hindering efforts to understand how departments could speed up recruitment. As a first step, the Cabinet Office has set out how departments should measure recruitment times for civil service roles. But the challenge will be to make sure departments record and report recruitment times accurately, so that performance can be benchmarked with the aim of making recruitment faster. Recommendation 2: By the time of its Treasury Minute response, the Cabinet Office should require all departments to report data on recruitment times to it on a consistent and regular basis. It should use this information, along with data from external comparators, to establish benchmarks for recruitment times within the civil service.