Recommendation 11

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