Public sector recruitment can feel like playing whack-a-mole with a pool noodle. Budgets shrink, demand soars, and every neighbouring authority is hiring for the same urgent roles.
But it isn’t all doom and deficit. West Northamptonshire Council (WNC) have spent the last four years proving you can cope with cost constraints and build a people-powered recruitment engine – if you’re laser-focused on the right eight moves.
From urgent-role triage to purpose-rich EVP to agency-speed service in-house, these practical strategies help local government out-recruit the balance sheet.
Let’s dig in.
Watch WNC’s Alison Golding and Jess Lyon talk through these strategies in Episode 9 of The View. Or keep reading.
8-step public sector recruitment survival kit
- Target recruitment support on your hardest roles
When budget is spread thin, you need to make smart decisions about where you invest resources. Especially if, like WNC, you hire across an enormous variety of services. That’s where the authority’s ‘Wicked Role’ process comes in, empowering their resourcing team to focus time and attention on hard-to-fill roles while ‘easier’ positions remain manager self-service.
This process ensures the hardest roles get the most attention, with:
- Better recruitment metrics
- Proactive talent engagement
- Focus on speed and efficiency
It’s also critical here to make your managers’ lives as easy as possible from a process and tech standpoint. The less support managers need, the more time your team has free for recruiting. So those recruiting hours and pounds stretch further.
- Bring laser-focus to EVP and employer brand
WNC is a relatively new unitary authority, formed from four separate councils on 1st April 2021. That’s meant they were plunged into the market — facing a challenging funding landscape and high-volume, varied recruitment requirements — without any visible market presence or brand awareness.
For the team, that’s been both a big challenge and an opportunity; an opportunity few organisations get to build their employer brand and EVP from the ground-up.
The team ran workshops across the organisation, to understand:
- What really gets WNC’s people out of bed in the morning
- What challenges people face working in local government
- What their people value about WNC’s culture and benefits
Then they embedded this understanding into an employer brand that truly reflects who they are and what they can offer. Starting from the inside-out is a recipe for authenticity candidates can smell a mile off.
A strong and authentic brand, purpose, vision, and values empower WNC to compete for talent, even from the private sector, without being able to offer top-dollar salaries.
Read more: An employer brand audit for the public sector
- Build dedicated talent pools
When you’re constantly hiring for hard-to-hire roles, you can’t keep fishing in the same over-fished ponds. WNC are always looking for new untapped pools of talent, to access candidates that might not be on other organisations’ radar yet.
One effective tactic has been their Care Leavers Pathfinder Programme.
The programme is coordinated by Integrated Care Northamptonshire and has several partners across the region, including WNC. The aim is to give care-experienced young people supported routes into employment, with a combination of meaningful work experience and skills development like CV writing and interviewing.
Pathfinder has been a resounding success so far, and they’re now rolling the pilot into twice-annual programmes as well as aiming to scale into other business units. Food for thought for other local government recruiters.
- Cement DEI as a core priority
Diversity, equity and inclusion are huge priorities for WNC. And being a fairly new organisation, they had the rare opportunity to embed this into their people strategy from the get-go.
Read more: How local authorities can make DEI progress
They understood that a major driver — both for employees and for the communities they support — was to feel heard. As a result, listening and celebrating different perspectives and views is central to their culture.
Some practical ways WNC have centred DEI include:
- Concrete three-year diversity strategy underpinning three-year people strategy: a statement of intent and a map to better
- Strong number of staff networks sharing ideas, suggestions, feedback, barriers, and celebrations
- ‘Reverse mentoring’ scheme seeing senior leaders mentored by individuals with protected characteristics across the organisation
- ‘Elevate’ programme developed to create an inclusive talent pool and actively surfacing and addressing barriers to progression
For WNC, like every local government organisation, active commitment to DEI is essential to build a workforce that truly represents and serves the local community.
- Foster relationships with younger demographics
Like many local government organisations, WNC battle the tension between increasing demand from an aging population with an aging workforce. It’s a demographic timebomb that means their ability to continue to serve the community hinges on attracting and retaining younger workers.
With that in mind, the team work hard to:
- Foster relationships with local schools and universities
- Offer support with student placements and dissertation project work
- Boost visibility over the breadth of roles in local government
- Create practical career pathways for younger people to enter the authority
For many jobseekers, the public sector has a certain reputation – one that’s far from the whole picture. A major part of attracting more younger people into the workforce is counteracting this image, showcasing what makes local government special.
- Encourage public/private cross-pollination
The public sector has much to learn from the private sector, as well as much to teach. Alison talks about the need to cross-pollinate, attracting private sector employees – especially leaders – into local government, to help share their knowledge.
For WNC, one important aspect is offering solid management development courses to help new-to-the-sector leaders get up to speed fast. It’s about bringing people along on that new career journey and being truly inclusive to people from all backgrounds.
- Prioritise agency-like speed and service
Talking of cross-pollination, ex-agency recruiter Jess talks about the lessons in-house recruiters can learn from their agency counterparts:
- Working at speed
- Treating managers as customers
- Delivering an excellent candidate experience
- Engaging with talent proactively
WNC aim to embed these principles in their in-house team, to deliver a better, faster, more empathetic recruitment process and experience that prioritises people. A lynchpin of better hiring.
- Explore efficiency-boosting tech
For Alison, one of the major challenges for the whole public sector over the next decade is integrating technology. WNC have set up an Innovation Hub to actively explore:
- How to maximise RPA, AI, and recruitment software
- How to weave tech into their daily workflows
- How to attract the tech skills to keep growing as an organisation
This last one is the real chicken-and-egg problem for a sector that’s traditionally seen as less ‘techy’. That is, organisations need great tech people to upskill and build culture, but great tech people are often attracted to places that are already tech-forwards.
These are the thorny questions the public sector needs to address, to keep pace with innovation, attract the right people, and deliver modern, value-add services for modern lives.
Build the talent engine your communities deserve
Funding gaps aren’t vanishing tomorrow and hard-to-hire candidates won’t suddenly queue round the block. But WNC reminds us that resourcefulness can go toe-to-toe with resources (even if, yes, more resources would be lovely).
Pick your battlegrounds, double-down on brand and EVP, and borrow shamelessly from the best of agency and private-sector practice. Layer in smart tech where it removes friction and you’ll free enough time — and budget — to focus on what really matters: getting brilliant people into roles that keep your communities thriving.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Interviewing, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for faster, fairer, better recruitment for everyone.
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