Creating Capacity

Summit, Oct/Nov 2008 by Dixon, Mark

Canada's major government employers are facing many challenges. Service and public accountability expectations continue to increase; capital and operating budgets are not keeping pace with those expectations and the attraction, retention and growth of its human resources are being exacerbated by national shortages of qualified professionals.

ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT in Canada from municipalities, health care providers through to the federal government are facing a huge talent crunch in the coming years. Federal projections run as high as 30 percent of the entire workforce retiring in the coming five years. To aven this disaster and ensure a smooth running public sector, all levels of government are turning to innovative solutions and partnerships to create capacity and win the "war for talent."

To ensure that service needs are met, many are turning to technology, outsourcing and creative internal programs to help human resource departments become more strategic to the organization. The lack of capacity in the public sector is creating a huge cost burden on many organizations and solutions are needed quickly - some of the numbers I have seen paint a scary picture:

* A major Ontario hospital has figured that they spend over $5M per year in additional overtime and temporary workers because they cannot fill their vacancies quickly enough.

* In one western province over $43M annually is spent covering shifts for absent health care workers.

* An Alberta agency told me recently that they lose a great number of candidates because it takes them over five weeks to create an offer letter and the candidate accepts another job elsewhere.

Attracting talent

To succeed in the war for talent, innovative public sector organizations are completing a metamorphosis from personal through strategic and into talent management of human resources to create capacity within their organization. Those that realize they are in competition for talent are already ahead of the curve and have begun to use technology and new thinking to help them attract new talent.

Traditionally when a vacancy needed to be filled, the hiring manager created a job requisition, and the recruitment team posted the job and hopefully started receiving résumés. Once hired, the process was complete until the next time when the whole process started over from scratch. The evolution of this "personal HR" to "strategic HR" has seen organizations turn to electronic job boards and résumés to replace paperbased systems, but they are still often a one job, one candidate type of solution.

New thinking rotates around the concept of creating a "talent pool." A talent pool is a collection of potential candidates that not only could fill the current vacancy but are kept in a database within the system that can be access by any hiring manager within an organization. Between requisitions, the HR team can correspond with the candidates, update them on goings on within the organization and test their availability and interest for new roles coming up. When a new role that matches their skills becomes available, the résumé is instantly available to the hiring manager, dramatically reducing the time to hire.

Recently, the Public Service Commission of Canada issued a request for information (RFI) to look at talent management systems because they have learned that the traditional hiring methods don't lend themselves to sharing of résumés between departments or even managers within the same department. The creation of talent pools helps an organization to attract talent more quickly while using fewer internal resources.

Talent pools get filled from a variety of internal and external sources. Internal job postings, employee résumés and traditional recruiters get combined with outside sources that new recruitment management systems make possible. Sou rang and channel management means going to the market rather than waiting for the market to come to you.

Today we are seeing innovative public sector employers, like the Calgary Health Region, turning to technology outsourcing to bring a wider range of employees into their talent pool, helping them dramatically reduce their time to hire. The savings generated can be turned back towards more strategic HR initiatives or to support the overall budget of the organization.

When it comes to winning the "war for talent," the public sector can emerge victorious if they adopt the right attitude and begin truly competing for talent.

These five key points can help:

1. Evolve from job requisitions to talent pools/pipelines;

2. Upgrade/enhance technology to make it easier to source and manage talent pools through the implementation of recruitment management systems and processes;

3. Innovate sourcing and channel management practices to proactively fill the talent pool;

4. Align external assessment methodologies with that of your internal talent pool to ensure that all job competencies align with your internal requirements; and

5. Stimulate/revalidate your brand - create a pull that makes candidates want to work for you, those with the most pull will get the best candidates.