Recommendation 10

Most departments—14 out of the 16 main civil service departments in 2022—do not collect full information on their recruitment costs and therefore do not understand how much it costs them to hire staff. The Ministry of Justice told us that, in common with most other departments, it does not track the cost of staff time spent on recruitment activities by line managers involved in hiring staff.19 HMRC is the only department that is able to calculate its cost per hire, a standard measure for assessing the efficiency of recruitment processes calculated by dividing total recruitment costs by the number of people recruited. HMRC attributed this to the fact that its recruitment is largely centrally run by HR or specialised teams. Having centralised recruitment processes means HMRC is more readily able to capture data on the time spent on recruitment activities and the cost involved.20