Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 11
11
Accepted
Civil Service People Plan omits mandatory recruitment cost metrics, hindering consistent departmental reporting.
Recommendation
The Cabinet Office noted that it was seeking to improve cost data and was benchmarking all costs associated with recruitment, which would enable departments to compare cost elements such as those for advertising or employment checks.21 However, there are no metrics on recruitment costs in the Civil Service People Plan, such as cost per hire, that departments will need to report against.22 The Cabinet Office did not confirm whether it would require departments to report recruitment costs consistently, particularly those costs that departments struggle to report such as the cost of hiring managers’ time spent on recruitment. Instead, the Cabinet Office stated only that departments had “very strong incentives” to understand how to lower their recruitment costs.23
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.