When was the last time you went looking for a government job?
If you are a government HR leader, it may have been a while. If not, you probably went to the same old government job board, randomly searched through the agencies posted there, then scoured and vigorously reviewed their same static look-alike job pages with seemingly no end in sight before you finally stumbled across the right vacancy.
Then you endured the massive application and rigorous assessment, eligible list, and certification slog; civil service processes that feel like an albatross placed around public sector’s neck as penance for the abuses of Ancient Mariners past. After four to six months or more you finally received your job offer.
That works fine for the stalwart career government workforce of today, and civil service techniques are here for a reason – but today, public agencies have to attract and engage newer generations that simply have no appetite for a painful application nor tolerance for a long, drawn-out assessment and selection process. Many of those with the fortitude to get through to the hire often quit when left disengaged by disjointed and manual transitions from hire to productive employment.
The public sector needs modern tools to reduce civil service friction and vastly improve the candidate experience.
Today, job seekers expect jobs to come to them instead of the other way around. Government agencies can no longer ‘post and pray’, hoping that candidates will come out of the woodwork and run an onerous selection process gauntlet.
In fact, your best candidates may not be ‘seeking’ at all. According to Cammack Retirement, the number of job openings now exceeds the number of unemployed workers for the first time in nearly two decades. Chances are good that the skilled (or even entry-level) talent you are looking for is employed elsewhere. You have to go out and find them!
Fortunately, Oracle’s Talent Acquisition Cloud Service (OTAC) helps you turn your current workforce into an army of recruiters, by letting them opt-in to sharing your jobs across their personal and professional social networks.
Managed and automated employee referral campaigns are just one part of effective outreach. If your agency is among public sector thought leaders, internal recruiters are tied up manually managing postings on social media sites, job boards, and professional organization boards. Keeping all of them straight, managing closing dates, and ensuring consistent brand messaging with your direct career portal is a full-time job.
Recruiters can learn a lot from consumer web sites. Sure, you can find anything on the web – but the most successful on-line businesses advertise directly based on consumer’s interests. OTAC allows recruiting administrators to build and deploy an unlimited number of mobile-friendly portals featuring a selection of pre-defined content templates. The implications for targeted veteran and diversity recruiting alone are staggering – let alone hard to fill positions!
Of course, that still leaves the candidate standing on your doorstep wondering whether to ring the bell. Because OTAC content portals contain targeted messaging, you can engage them there with a digital assistant to get them across the threshold. To keep the pace, resume and LinkedIn/Indeed profile parsing gets more than half the job of applying done for them, and pre-screening questionnaires help ensure that you don’t waste their time or yours.
Niche civil service systems just can’t deliver that kind of recruiting innovation, nor will they be able to keep up with the trends that continue to change how we think about HR every day.
So no, civil service doesn’t have to be your recruiting albatross. Learn more at the OTAC webpage and at the Oracle Cloud Marketplace civil service partner site.
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