Recommendation 6

However, the commitments and metrics in the Civil Service People Plan do not set out target or expected levels of performance against which the Cabinet Office can measure and evaluate the success of the Plan. For example, recruitment times will be measured using a common time to hire metric, but the Cabinet Office told us it was not yet able to specify a benchmark for how many days it should take departments to hire staff.9 The People Plan also does not say how it will improve the poor state of much departmental workforce data, such as recruitment costs. The Cabinet Office said it was working to improve the data picture, for example by benchmarking all of the costs involved in recruitment.10 However, it acknowledged the broader point that departments were at different stages in terms of the quality of their HR systems and the quality of data in those systems.11 Recruitment times