e-Council Saves Time and Money
By taking time-consuming administrative duties off the recruitment team's hands, online applications also save the recruitment team valuable time.
Online Recruitment Systems
The press are sometimes too easy with their criticism of government programmes, with the 2005 e-government target being a case in point. Recent reports have asked how well the e-government programme is progressing. But the criticism is misleading, as the example of Aylesbury Vale District Council demonstrates.
Aylesbury Vale DC added a jobs service to its Web site this year to attract more candidates and offer greater flexibility to potential applicants. The system had the added benefit of helping the recruitment team manage its administrative workload. Hence, Councils like Aylesbury Vale have found that their efforts to meet the 2005 deadline have borne fruit – both for citizens and council organisations.
Since July, when Harlequin Solutions installed its online recruitment system, Punch Job Solutions, at Aylesbury, the number of people applying for jobs online has exceeded everyone’s expectations.
Sue Giles, principal personnel officer at Aylesbury Vale District Council, estimates that applicants applying online have almost doubled since the system went live.
Pithy service
The attraction for candidates is the range of online recruitment services offered by Punch Job Solutions. It allows candidates to browse for jobs online, download job packs and apply on line as well. Better still, applicants can save an incomplete application and come back to it later. And they can register on the site to be alerted when suitable jobs come up.
By taking time-consuming administrative duties off the recruitment team's hands, online applications also save the recruitment team valuable time. With over 600 staff in the council, the team advertises for about half a dozen posts a week, with vacancies often rising to more than 20. The recruitment process can be labour intensive because of the need to take telephone enquiries, print and copy job packs and post information to applicants.
"Our team gets more done now because more applications are being made online," says Giles. "We have probably saved at least a day or more a week for the team as a whole, giving us time to do more analytical work."
Punch Job Solutions has not only freed Giles' team to be more strategic about recruitment, but it has also helped them do it. Their extra time is spent making sure they are doing the right things to attract the kind of candidates they are looking for.
Value marketing
Meanwhile, links from specialist sites, such as career sites for young people, black and other minority ethnic groups and disabled people, help Aylesbury get its message out to the kind of people it wants to attract.
Recruitment marketing has also been given a boost by the use of online job packs, which can be better designed with less expense. "We can market ourselves more creatively with the web site," says Giles.
Online recruitment is not panacea, however. Giles says there are still barriers to its adoption, such as the preference of some candidates to respond to newspaper adverts. But the essence of the service, as with any e-government service, is choice. "It is important that we still allow applicants to apply in ways that suit them, while trying to sell the benefits of applying on-line," says Giles.
So Aylesbury's is an example of a successful e-government project that, like many others, has been overlooked in press reports that are too eager to criticise. Those looking for further evidence of e-government success should look at a report published last month by the Society of Information Technology Management, called Big Successes by Small Councils. It provides essential balance for any e-government project leader who has been reading about nothing but doom and gloom but suspects there is another side to the story.
