Talent Cloud Results Report

The Problem

The National Capital Region (NCR) accounts for only 4% of Canada’s labour force, but 42% of the Federal Public Service works there. The ability to hire employees to work outside the location of the physical office is a policy flexibility that has not been traditionally used. (Based on workshops with managers and HR advisors, we suspect this was due to a combination of managers not being encouraged to offer this flexibility, and the GC Jobs system default forcing the choice of specified location(s) of work based on government office.)

While many departments also staff positions in regional offices, “work from anywhere” was not a standard hiring practice when Talent Cloud first launched this as a platform-based staffing option in October 2018. (Notably, in January 2021, the Public Service Commission adapted the GC Jobs platform to include this option, largely in response to the impact of COVID-19 on the federal workforce. It’s an exciting development for workers across Canada.)

The Hypotheses

• Talent is everywhere, and subsequently the talent government needs is likely to be regionally distributed across Canada, rather than occurring at a significantly disproportionately higher per capita rate in the NCR;
• Allowing applications from employees across Canada looking for a remote-work accessible position will increase the chance of finding people with rare or in demand skills;
• Managers who allow applications from remote workers will see an increase in the number of high quality applications;
• Given the choice of talent from remote and NCR applications, managers will choose to hire remote workers at least some of the time, resulting in greater geographic diversity in Talent Cloud hires than in standard “NCR only” or “regional office only” positions.

The Experiment

To promote remote accessible jobs, we engineered a hiring model optimized to allow employees to work from anywhere. The first step is to encourage managers to consider accepting applications from people from outside their geographic region.

Talent Cloud job advertisements tell applicants a lot more about the job than they would see on a typical poster. This includes information about ‘workplace environment’, such as whether the position allows flex hours and whether it is available for remote work.

When managers build a job advertisement, the default selection for remote work is that it is allowed. This is a nudge that forces managers to intentionally exclude remote workers and say that they only want to consider applications from people in their geographic region. In a traditional job process, the opposite has been true (where managers listed a government office location for work, and would have to draft additional text and justifications if remote work was allowed). We make sure to give managers the definition of what ‘remote work’ means right in the tool on the Manager Portal for building job advertisements, and we provide support to managers who choose to assess and/or hire remote workers.

"Opening jobs to remote workers allows managers to tap into a whole new talent pool."

Platform Interventions

1. Make the Option Available: The first and most important intervention Talent Cloud crafted in promoting remote work accessible jobs was making this an option in the selection menu that managers and HR advisors worked with while crafting a job advertisement on the platform’s Job Poster Builder. Up until this time, managers reported that even when they wanted to offer remote work accessible positions, corporate opposition and difficulties in posting led them to back away from offering this option. When managers learned it was simply available, many readily adopted it without much persuasion.
2. Make it the Default: In government, managers are trained to accept the default. Managers reported that defaults meant corporate direction had been set, and opting for something other than the default not only required more work, but it also felt vaguely non-compliant. In this case, we reversed the trend that managers had been told for years (avoid remote work) and made it the new normal (promote remote work).
3. Nudge to Keep the Default: Ideally, we would have the numbers to run a randomized control trial to test different nudges and see how different interventions stacked up to create the strongest outcome. In this case, we simply added a line (see screenshot below) that connected allowing remote work to a higher quality of talent pool. While this was a nudge based on our hypothesis and supported by external research, it proved true. Those advertisements allowing remote work drew better talent and had a higher success rate in securing a top quality final hire. (This is one of three flexibilities that hiring managers using Talent Cloud were nudged to adopt. See the research section on Flexibility Matters for insights on how these flexibilities impacted the applicants’ decision to apply. The “why” might surprise you - it surprised us.)
4. Advertise Clearly to Applicants: Job advertisements on Talent Cloud contained one of these two phrases: “Remote Work Allowed” or “Remote Work Not Allowed”. In user testing, several managers expressed their discomfort with the clarity of this language. (Notably, applicants reported that they really appreciated the clarity.) Several managers requested that we simply advertise when it was allowed, and be vague about when it wasn’t. Talent Cloud declined to make this change because part of the research (qualitative and quantitative) was to determine if clear allowance (or non-allowance) of remote work made a difference to the application rates and final results. Turns out it does… Quite a big difference, in fact.

The Results

• 92% of the 53 jobs posted to Talent Cloud had the home office in the NCR.
• 36% of the jobs on the platform were advertised as “Remote Work Allowed”
• In cases where managers allowed remote work they received 63% more applicants than those that did not allow remote work.
• For CS positions, allowing remote work increased the number of applicants by 83%.
• All job processes allowing remote work had qualified candidates in the applicant pool.
• Only five Talent Cloud job posters failed to attract qualified candidates, and four more saw the qualified candidates decline the position. None allowed for remote work.
• When presented with a candidate pool that included remote applicants, more than half of managers selected a remote worker as the hire, including some from small communities. This indicates that there is a wide, largely untapped pool of talent across Canada.
• Managers who made remote hires reported during interviews that they would consider applications from remote workers in the future.

External Research

Because of COVID-19, remote work is commonplace, so it is easy to forget that before the pandemic remote work was one of the most desirable perks that an employer could offer, with one study showed that 57% of the workforce said that the option to work remotely is their most prefered perk.

Workers have also been able to assign a dollar-figure to being able to work from home. A 2017 study from Stanford study showed the average worker would be willing to give up 8% of their income to work from home. Remote employees are also able to work from anywhere, and have been shown to relocate to regions with lower costs of living, allowing them to stretch their income further.

Supporting remote work also helps to keep the top talent that you already have! One study showed that 74% percent of knowledge-based industry workers in the United States would quit their job for one that offers remote positions, and that 26% had already left a job for that reason. These findings were supported by another study that showed companies that support remote work have a 25% lower employee turnover rate than those that don’t.

Insights

By using a small nudge on the job poster builder, many managers were persuaded to change long-held behaviours and chose to accept applications from remote workers. This gave them access to more talent and made it more likely that they would make a hire.

Government is a huge employer. If this model was permanently applied across GC hiring, it could be a high value social impact at scale and pave the way towards regionally representative diversity in government employment. At the community level, this could aid in accelerating distributed economic recovery, and improve the quality of the Public Service’s talent base.

While the Talent Cloud experiment yielded promising signals, it’s still very small in scale. We’re hopeful there will be larger scale research from other GC HR authorities on the impact of the 2021 change to the GC Jobs platform allowing remote work. We look forward to comparing notes and findings.