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ITEM BV9 - ANNEX 2

BEST VALUE COMMITTEE – 23 JUNE 2004

VALUE FOR MONEY – BEST VALUE REVIEW PROGRAMME

Reengineering the Recruitment Process

Scoping Report

 

Members of team

 

 

 

Project Sponsor

Service Lead

Project Manager

Steve Munn

Angela Edward

Janet Bolam

Head of Service, Human Resource

County Human Resources, Resources Directorate

Performance and Review Unit

Working Party

Hilary Higginson

Grainne Darnton

Lydia Jewell

Georgina Harper

Sally Jones

Carol Harding

Wendy Hodgetts

Amy Causby

Jonathan Roger

Julie Summersbee

Social & Healthcare

Social & Healthcare

Environment & Economy

Learning and Culture

Learning and Culture

Learning and Culture

Community Safety

Resources

Resources

County Facilities Management

Support

 

Designated member:

 

Jessica Rowan

Lizanne Ryder

TBA

ICT

MIS Support

Introduction

  1. At the May 2004 Best Value Review Committee meeting, a proposal to develop a single Value for Money Best Value Review, with a number of workstreams was accepted. One of the workstreams was for a programme of process reengineering across services where there is evidence of a need to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the process employed An initial pilot for this approach has been agreed, and will now form part of the Value for Money review.

  2. Prior to this decision, work had been undertaken via the Customer Services Board to develop a pilot study to test process reengineering as a tool to deliver improved, more efficient services and also to test our ability to undertake this work inhouse –rather than to pay for external consultants. The Customer Services Board requested that the pilot met the following criteria:
    • that it was a cross cutting exercise,
    • that it involved MIS,
    • that it was a process of substantial size.

As a result, the recruitment process was selected as the subject of the pilot. This was endorsed by the Leaders Group, who awarded Modernisation Funds to undertake the study.

Deliverables and benefits of using recruitment as a pilot project

3. Gain consistency in the recruitment process across the council.

Currently, each directorate recruits staff independently and there is no consistent process for undertaking recruitment. This exercise will identify a common approach for most types of staff. A consistent approach will be more efficient and cost effective and is essential if the SAP recruitment module and on line job application is to be successfully introduced.

4. Improve the speed of the recruitment process.

The delays in filling vacancies has been identified as critical by most services in a series of risk workshops recently undertaken. Removal of rework, waste and duplication of effort will improve efficiency and speed up processes. The integration of IT into the process will further improve this. The benefits of this are shorter times with vacancies, a better experience for applicants, and an improved chance of recruiting high quality staff.

5. Create capacity to "do the things we don’t do now".

The Employers Organisation Report and the Best Value Review, Developing Our Staff, identified areas of service that should be tackled. The release of resource due to more efficient working will enable some of this.

6. Enable people working on the process to see the context and the value of the work they are doing.

This technique will result in a much greater awareness of the end-to-end process and how well individuals contribute to it. This makes ongoing improvement to processes easier.

7. Identify the costs of the process and therefore identifying where savings can be made

To make a contribution to the savings required by the Medium Term Financial Plan, which will be achieved by identifying existing costs of the process and identifying areas where changes to process can produce savings.

8. Provide a clear brief for procurement eg when setting contracts for advertising jobs
  1. Develop as a by product an ‘in-house’ capability to undertake these exercises rather than rely on external consultants.

Overall approach

10 Appendix 1 explains what the process reengineering approach involves and the rationale behind its use.

Appendix 2 is the project plan for the exercise.

11. The project will take 6 weeks to complete, and the outcome will be an action plan to take forward the service improvements identified.

A major challenge will be to embrace the way we recruit the huge diversity of staff we employ in the council, and to incorporate different needs for different staff types. The way we propose to do this is to adopt a structured, phased approach:
    1. Undertake the exercise focussing on how we recruit administrative staff across the whole council.
    2. Once we have established how different directorates undertake this, we will identify a common process to be adopted Council wide-to be known as the core process.
    3. The Directorates will then be asked to identify the other groups of staff they recruit.
    4. They will be asked how many of these staff could be recruited in the same way as we recruit administrative staff, and if there is departure from this, what and why.

The use of his techniques should then give us a main, core way of recruiting staff and will enable us to understand the key departures from this for big groups of staff eg teachers, firefighters etc and what we need to do additional to the core to meet the needs of specialised recruitment.

Member involvement

  1. As this exercise will have commenced before the committee meeting in June, it is proposed that a member of the Best Value Committee is identified to link to this work and that they attend the regular meetings of the project steering group which currently consists of the project sponsor (in this case the Head of Human Resources), the HR recruitment service lead and project manager from Performance and Review.

Janet Bolam
David Lines

June 2nd 2004

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