Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 10
10
Accepted
Most departments lack comprehensive recruitment cost data, hindering efficiency understanding and comparison.
Recommendation
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
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and has implemented a set of consistent Civil Service recruitment measures for 17 Whitehall departments, including 'cost per hire,' which will be evaluated for consistent reporting across departments by November 2024.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
3.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: November 2024 3.2 The Cabinet Office has implemented a set of consistent and comparable Civil Service recruitment measures for the 17 Whitehall departments, one of which is cost per hire. 3.3 The cost per hire metric asks departments to take account of internal costs (time and resource) and external costs (systems and outsourcing), divided by the number of appointments in the reporting period. As well as taking account of the number of successful appointments made in the reporting period, departments are asked to monitor the number of failed campaigns that did not result in an appointment to provide insight into the volume of recruitment activity that does not yield a return on investment. 3.4 Initially, cost per hire reporting will also require departments to provide a narrative context as to the costs factored into the calculation to ensure benchmarking can be made to a comparable standard. 3.5 The consistency of the cost per hire measurement will be evaluated and the Cabinet Office will define an approach that ensures equal effort and quality of reporting across departments from November 2024.