Recommendation 9

The Cabinet Office acknowledged that departments did not collect consistent and comparable data on how long it takes to recruit and vet candidates.16 The Cabinet Office told us it is working to improve the understanding of recruitment times across the civil 8 Cabinet Office, Civil Service statistics: 2019, 24 July 2019; Cabinet Office, Civil Service statistics: 2023, 2 August 2023 9 Qq10, 15 10 Qq29, 31 11 Q97 12 C&AG’s Report, para 2.4 13 Q10 14 Q12; C&AG’s Report, paras 10–11 15 Q12 16 Q13; C&AG’s Report, paras 2.4, 2.8 10 Civil service workforce: Recruitment, pay and performance management service, including by setting common metrics for time to hire and time to fill that should result in more consistent, better-quality data that can be used to benchmark departmental performance.17 However, the People Plan states that its recruitment time metrics will only be reported for departments that are Government Recruitment Service customers, rather than all departments, which reduces the completeness of benchmarking that can be done and hence its usefulness.18 Recruitment costs and efficiency