Section 4 looks at Talent Cloud’s final main performance objective: Reducing Time to Staff. (See Sections 2 and 3 for research on our other main performance objectives: optimizing the hiring outcome and advancing diversity.)
Section 4 includes data showing how the overall time to staff came down as Talent Cloud introduced new features on the platform. It looks at the results of experiments designed to tackle specific aspects of time to staff, such as procrastination behaviours, application volume, and process delays. It also provides a few insights on ways to mitigate or stop certain practices that are systemically supported in the current GC staffing approach, but are contributing to longer hiring times and risk the loss of top talent. This research presents alternative approaches that can be used to rethink both procedural and behavioural elements of the staffing process, reducing time to staff and improving hiring outcomes.
Talent Cloud set an extremely ambitious target of reducing time to staff to 30 days (plus security clearance time) from the time a poster went live to the time the hire was finalized. While the time to complete security clearances remained relatively stable throughout, the time to get to a live poster and the time to find a top hire were reduced by more than 85 days. In the end, Talent Cloud landed with the most recent staffing processes on the platform taking ~40 days to final selection of the hire, plus security clearance. While not everything we tried worked, the overall impact of the interventions was significant.
List of Experiments and Interventions
- Overall Impact on Reducing Time to Staff
- Where did 110 days of savings come from?
- Points of Intervention to Reduce Time-to-Staff
- Impact of Speed on Retention of Top Talent
- Optimizing the Volume of Applications
- Optimizing the Number of Selection Criteria
- Integrated Priority Screening
- Security Clearance
- Research Summary: Simpler Text for Official Languages
- How Talent Cloud Builds Platform Tools
- A Tool to Build Optimized Job Advertisements
- A Tool for Assessment Planning
- A Tool for Applicant Tracking
- A Tool for Record of Decision
If you staff quickly, but end up with a hire who’s only adequate and isn’t a strong culture fit to the team, the process will fail to produce the end results Canadians need: a high performing team delivering top quality work. Getting a fast hire with a bad fit is a waste of time and energy, and draws down negatively on the emotional reserves of everyone involved. Speed has to be integrated into the design in a way that the behavioural choices work in service of the overall goal: getting a great hire quickly in a way that shows the best of GC values. This includes a commitment to advancing inclusion and diversity, even as the system endeavours to streamline its time to staff.
In innovation circles, there’s an expression that there’s no silver bullet for solving a complex problem, only silver buckshot. What this means is that when there are multiple competing factors involved in creating a problem, the “solution” also has to be multifaceted and adaptive.
Talent Cloud considered 20 individual factors in our efforts to reduce time to staff, which we identified initially through workshops with managers, HR advisors, employees, and external applicants. These factors ranged from process steps to the way in which specific information influenced the probability of manager and HR advisor procrastination. After identifying these 20 promising points of investigation, we set about testing the scale of their influence, looking for ways to quickly and easily reduce time to staff. (These 20 factors and their impact are listed in the summary on Overall Impact of Reducing Time to Staff included in this section of the report.)
While a few of these factors proved to be more influential than others in bringing down time to staff on the Talent Cloud platform, in the end most played some role in producing the intended outcome. We found that there was no single factor that would solve the issue of reducing time to staff; it could only be achieved with attention to multiple key factors. Fortunately, none of these factors proved impossible to influence on the platform, indicating that the Government of Canada could adapt these findings to other platforms and approaches.
The role of behavioural patterns was one of the areas Talent Cloud paid careful attention to in our efforts to reduce time to staff. What became rapidly apparent was that there were a number of behaviours related to staffing, developed strategically by different user groups, that were adversely impacting time to staff. Surprisingly, these behaviours were actually being driven by the system itself, as individual actors looked to protect their interests. The cumulative impact was a bogged down system with misaligned behaviours that further exacerbated the delays.
To reduce behaviours that slow down staffing, the system needs to clearly identify them and take corrective steps. Platform and process design choices need to strategically deter these behaviours, and incentivize others. The following section looks at some of the interventions we tried to deter these behaviours, and the impact of these design features.
