As soon as managers start looking at the applications submitted to their job advertisement they start making decisions about which candidates are qualified and which candidates are not. Managers are required to record these decisions so they can be reviewed by their HR advisor, forming part of the official HR record, to ensure transparency and accountability in government job competitions.
The record of decision tool is intended to provide managers with a step by step process for reviewing job applications and recording the decisions made on the platform, in real-time as they progress through the staffing process. It organizes and presents the information provided by the applicant, as well as assessment decisions by managers at successive evaluation stages. The logic flow and standardization options are designed to facilitate a fast, accountable, consistent decision making process. Because of the different HR systems used by various HR advisors, the tool is also designed to produce an exportable record.
In the future the intention is to make this tool interoperable with the assessment planning tool, ratings guide builder, and applicant tracking system. This would also require the implementation of planned adjustments to these other tools to promote a smooth user experience and maximize pre-populated data and automated functionality across the platform.
The record of decision tool is in the advanced design phase of our product cycle, having gone through multiple rounds of iteration and mock process testing. However, without a Protected B server environment, we aren’t able to post assessment records on the platform because of the level of personal information they include. Because of this restriction against the tool hasn’t been released yet.
High fidelity prototypes have been produced, with the help of input from several dozen managers and HR advisors in workshops, and through observation of the final HR steps required for live job processes in more than a dozen departments. The prototypes developed were then qualitatively tested with roughly a dozen HR advisors and managers, but the tool has not gone to the development team for coding.
It remains a pain point for managers to capture a record of decision (decision and rationale) that meets the requirements of an accountable, transparent HR record. In essence, managers must account for their thinking as they review each applicant for each selection criteria during each assessment method applied. This also has a major impact on time-to-staff, as some of the work to record and report these decisions is often done retroactively at the end of the process. This can easily add weeks to the hiring process while managers and HR advisors go back-and-forth to ensure everything is in order.
The ways in which HR advisors require the selection decisions to be presented are based on years of practice and legal case precedent, but what is clear to HR is not always intuitive to managers. It would save managers a lot of time and effort if the platform was able to collect and present this information in a simple way that was validated by HR advisors as meeting policy requirements.
