Long timelines to staff can have several negative consequences on hiring outcomes, including adversely impacting the ability to attract high performing talent and increasing the possibility that processes will be cancelled due to shifting corporate priorities. Long staffing times can also create extended vacancies in an organization to the detriment of organizational performance.
At the time when Talent Cloud first launched, it took 197 median days to staff an externally advertised position in the Government of Canada. This number counts the time from the job advertisement closes on GC Jobs to the first occurrence of the employee in the pay system. It should be noted that this figure includes aggregated data from both indeterminate and term staffing. (Talent Cloud only advertises term staffing positions, but the administrative steps for staffing term and indeterminate positions are the same.) This time to staff does not include lead up time for managers and HR advisors, such as crafting the job advertisement and securing approvals to staff.
Talent Cloud reasoned that if the time to staff could be reduced, it would have positive impacts on the government’s ability to attract high performing talent and be an asset to managers needing to fill vacancies. But how long would the time to staff need to be reduced by? Because there was no clear data on what target we were aiming to hit, we decided to make it as fast as we thought might be possible. Even if we fell short, hopefully we’d be able to show progress against the average time to staff.
Talent Cloud set an extremely ambitious target of reducing time to staff to 30 days from the time a job advertisement closed to the selection of the final candidate (this does not include additional time for security clearance and/or language testing). Notably, it also doesn’t include the time managers and HR advisors put into getting to a live job advertisement, but here we aimed to bring the time to staff down to a few weeks at most (with the fastest time possible being two days).
There was nothing magic about the 30 day target, it was just a nice round number that seemed in line with private sector industries. From an applicant’s perspective, one month to a verbal offer, plus security clearance time, sounded competitive and reasonable.
Early on, we laid out 20 points of intervention that we thought had the potential to drive down the average number of days it took to staff a position. These interventions fell into three broad categories:
These interventions are outlined in greater detail in the following pages.
“Talent Cloud days” represent the number of days from the time the job advertisement closed on our platform to the time a verbal offer was given to the manager’s chosen applicant, which covered the majority of Talent Cloud’s platform interventions on reducing time to staff. Following the verbal offer, a second count of days represents the time for security clearance, language testing and HR finalization, which Talent Cloud had little to no influence over.
While the time to complete security clearances remained relatively stable throughout, the average time to staff (as influenced by the platform) was reduced by more than 85 days over the course of the pilot. The most recent staffing processes on the platform took ~40 days from the close of the job advertisement to final selection of the hire. This is a significant reduction - a trend that we first began to see with some jobs in the summer of 2019, and one that has continued to grow with more recent postings.
It is also worth noting that these two most recent processes were the first two to do the initial screening of applications as they were received. (All previous processes began screening applications once the job advertisement had closed.) This effectively means that the clock for processes is not only shorter, but can now be started sooner, which has the potential to save another 1-3 weeks in the staffing process.
When we looked at the way time to staff was reduced, we noted another interesting finding. A closer look at the data shows it’s clear that saying the average time went down to ~40 Talent Cloud days in the last year doesn't tell the whole story.
In fact, when we looked closely at the last 8 jobs advertised on the platform, we realized we were seeing two tracks developing: 4 processes that took longer and 4 processes that were much faster, showing us 2 distinct patterns of behaviour on the platform. These trends correlate directly with observations from Talent Cloud’s live testing showing that those who followed the recommended practices and used the tools on the site (as intended) saw a faster trajectory. In essence, Talent Cloud was able to reduce the time down to a matter of a few weeks for a manager to arrive at a verbal offer to a top candidate in a competitive, externally advertised process. This is a remarkable leap forward - one which places the Government of Canada in a strong position to attract and secure high performing applicants.
“While COVID-19 reduced the volume of jobs advertised on the Talent Cloud platform, our fastest hiring processes were conducted in 2020, showing that Talent Cloud’s time to staff continued to drop despite the challenges of the past year. The release of new features and new research insights continued to help managers accelerate their processes and attract high-performing talent, recruited through externally advertised competitive processes.”
One metric used to evaluate the speed of a hire is the time from the interview to the letter of offer. In a 2017 study by Glassdoor, Canada ranked 4th out of 25 countries surveyed with an average time of 20.1 days, 2.6 below the international average. It should be noted that there is variability by industry. The report also showed that, internationally, government is also consistently the slowest industry to move from interview to final hire, often taking 1 ½ - 2 months to complete the hiring process post-interview.
Notably, the Government of Canada is competing with other industries in the country in search of high-performing talent. According to the 2019 Jobvite Recruiting Benchmark Report, the Information Technology field (which has the most overlap with positions listed on Talent Cloud), took an average of 42 days to staff a position. This is far below the Government of Canada’s average time to staff. It’s in line with the number of days it takes to get to a verbal offer using the Talent Cloud platform, although this is conditional on security screening and language testing which then take an additional 1-2 months to complete. This shows that the Government of Canada is likely going to need to consistently bring time to staff down to the timelines achieved by the Talent Cloud experiment, plus additional time savings in the security clearance process step, if it wants to be truly competitive with industry when it comes to recruiting top performing digital and technology talent.
