By Graham Clews
Whitehall’s recruitment process is too long and costly, the National Audit Office has found.
Its report, Recruiting civil servants efficiently, published on February 13, said the cost could be cut by as much as 68% without any drop in the quality of candidates. This would slash internal staff costs across government by £35m annually.
The NAO found that it could take up to 16 weeks to recruit staff. Time could be saved by better anticipation of the need for recruitment, using resources more efficiently and standardising the recruitment process.
Central government recruited more than 40,000 staff last year, but the departments rarely tested the effectiveness of their recruitment policies, according to the report.
Internal staff costs of recruiting an individual varied from £556 to £1,921 per position, the report said.
There was no centrally held data on the cost of central government recruitment programmes, it added.
Better workforce planning, standard job advertisements and application forms, and an earlier rooting out of unsuitable candidates could all improve the civil servant recruitment process, the NAO concluded.
NAO head Tim Burr said: ‘Departments often pay too little attention to how they manage the recruitment process. External recruitment currently takes longer and consumes more internal staff time than it should.’
Edward Leigh, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said that, in some Whitehall departments, 52% of junior civil servants left their posts within 12 months of being appointed.
He added: ‘Such an extraordinarily high departure rate raises a big question about the quality of the process used to recruit them.’
