Attraction, recruitment and retention

Key chapter findings

This year’s results confirm that there are skills shortages in the majority of agencies that are having a real impact on their ability to achieve their business goals. Agencies are putting in place a broad range of mechanisms aimed at addressing these skills shortages, including more innovative communication measures to provide information to prospective candidates and more varied study to work programmes, as well as creating partnerships with tertiary institutions and professional associations. Other agency mechanisms include learning and development strategies and performance management systems aligned with identified workforce requirements. A range of APS-wide initiatives are also proving useful in attracting people with specific skills sets. These mechanisms appear to have helped raise the profile of the APS as an employer, especially of university graduates.

One of the constraints on recruitment in the APS is the general expectation that people engaged as APS employees will be Australian citizens. Agency heads have the discretion to engage non-citizens where it is appropriate, for example, where the employee has an essential skill for the agency that is in short supply. Nevertheless, the citizenship requirement does limit the recruitment pool, particularly in a time of tight labour market conditions.

Agencies have also adopted a range of retention strategies aimed at employees with critical skills. These include tailored employment packages targeted at older workers (to keep them at work longer), the widespread use of remuneration-based approaches such as higher base salaries and performance-related and retention payments, alumni programmes and development opportunities.

Not all agencies, however, are responding at a strategic level to the increasing competition for scarce skills and talents. In many agencies, there appears to be scope for the corporate human resource function to better support line managers in attracting, recruiting and retaining employees, and in implementing formal approaches to workforce planning. For those agencies that are already well-advanced down this path, the next step is for workforce planning to be more linked with wider business planning processes. Embedding such links in governance structures, achieving commitment at senior levels, and adequate resourcing of the human resource function is required to realise this in practice.

There is also potential for agencies to look more strategically at the issues that attract and retain employees to their organisation. A key message for agencies looking to enhance their competitive position in the ‘talent war’ that emerges from this chapter is that, the attributes that attract are not necessarily all the ones that retain, although there may be some overlap. Agencies that embrace this message will ensure they develop tailored attraction and recruitment strategies that clearly market the set of organisational and job attributes valued by potential candidates, and broadcast this information widely to potential candidates through to new starters. They will also develop separate retention strategies targeted at both specific groups and skills sets, and existing staff more broadly.

There is a relatively high degree of commonality across demographic groups in the key attributes that attract and retain employees. For attraction, job security, interests matching job, career opportunities, desire to gain experience in the APS and location were key attributes. The most important common issues affecting retention were work-life balance, satisfaction with current job, career and development opportunities, working relationships, quality of senior leaders, remuneration and recognition.

However, significant differences were found in the relative importance of these attributes between agencies and between some specific groups of employees. These differences reinforce the importance of agencies finding out the attraction and retention issues that are important for their own organisation, and using them to improve their competitive position in the labour market.

A key priority for many agencies in attracting employees is streamlining recruitment processes. Around half of these processes are taking over two months and processes can be complex and off-putting, particularly for applicants from the private sector. The current legislative provisions give agencies considerable flexibility in their approach to merit. It may be that agencies and employees are confusing the need to apply merit with their internal non-mandatory process requirements. Chapter 6 discusses this issue in detail.

Most measures used by agencies to attract and retain people with skills in short supply focus on remuneration and other conditions of employment. This is understandable, given the short-term imperative to access these skills; however, over the longer term, this approach may be too narrow. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, there are limits to how closely the APS can match private sector remuneration levels. Secondly, there is a range of other attraction and retention issues that matter more to APS employees that could be marketed to potential applicants, including those with skills in particularly short supply (noting, however, that remuneration may matter more to some potential applicants than it does to those currently employed in the APS). Keeping an eye on the broad range of issues that attract and retain most employees is also likely to be a good investment in terms of the links between employee satisfaction and a workforce that is happy to recommend their agency as a good place to work.