#2 - Recruitment and Retention with Matt Lewis and Sam Hall

Hello, I'm S.A. Malfason. I've written a report for Sockotim on recruitment and retention issues for local public sector technology functions, and members can get access to this through the resource hub on the Sockotim website. This podcast is intended to pass on a few of the main things I've found, as well as comments from a couple of people I spoke to for the report. Rooting and retaining technology staff is difficult for the local public sector. The private sector can often pay more, and with the pandemic making remote working, much more common, local authorities can find themselves losing technologists to employers elsewhere in the country or even the world. But while it may not be possible to compete on pay, the public sector can take advantage of many people's enthusiasm to work flexibly. This isn't something that everyone wants, but research by the Office for National Statistics shows that just over half of all 35 to 44-year-old workers do so from home at least over time, along with as many as 4/5 of those earning more than £50,000 a year. Another research suggests that employees are keener than some employers, when it comes to flexible working, and this gives public sector employers the chance to develop an edge over the private sector. There's evidence that some are doing this. When I searched the Gunf UK Civil Service Jobs website in February, I found that 84% of the 720 jobs found by a search on digital were tagged flexible working, up from 77% in October, and meanwhile 60% were tagged job share. The Department for Work Compensions lets successful candidates work in hybrid fashion, some days at home and some days at one of its seven digital hubs across England. While we aren't talking about civil servants becoming digital nomads, this does provide DWP staff with a degree of flexibility, and means many will be able to take up jobs without having to move home. We've got a porto's lot to Matt Lewis, a socks-invite president and chief operating officer of SRS Wales, the collaborative ICT service for four councils and a police force in Southeast Wales. Matt spoke about the difficulties of recruiting and retaining technologists at last year's president's conference in Cardiff, including how some people had left for jobs in Bristol, overseas, or gained a London waiting despite working from home. He says that one issue is that local government isn't set up to pay higher salaries to non-managing specialists. You tend to have to have line management to be able to get above the 40-50K bracket, and for a lot of IT people, and probably for a lot of highly skilled people in other disciplines, line management isn't something they aspire to have, so architects, they just want to be technical, they want to be the gold to person for everything about technical, for networks or whatever. You'll have the same for planners, probably the same for finance. People who are amazing at what they know and what they do, you just can't get them about the scales without giving them line management, so that's one reason that people use on the phone. The other one is money, you know, at the moment with a cost of living issues, no one can turn down 15-20K with a young family, and the third one typically tends to be because we are quite complex, we look after five organisations, no matter how good the work that we do, they will always be five organisations that we support, and some people prefer just to look after one organisation. So a few of our staff, you know, as well as those other reasons, they've also said, I can go somewhere for more money, less working hours in a week, because then the new work in hour seems to be 35 and not 37, so I can drop hours, get more money, and I've only got the complexity of having to do something once, whereas for us you may have to do something five times because there are five separate organisations, so that complexity just seems to be frustrated some people as well, especially when you've gone off to just do something within one boundary for a lot more money. These issues aren't easy to solve, but Matt says there are other ways in which the local public sector undermines itself on recruitment. The reason that some people want to apply for roles with us is because of the application process, as a good example, the application process is so time consuming, the blank document is 30 pages long, and when you fill that document out, it can be anywhere up to 20, 25 pages long, so people just don't want to spend the time filling that in when they can apply for any other job on Indeed or LinkedIn, just by clicking on Apply here, and all their details are taken and submitted automatically, so you'll see where they hold online, so it's a very different HR process than most other organisations. Some Hall has worked in a number of senior jobs in public sector technology, including most recently Chief Digital Officer for Welsh Local Government, before moving last November to Digital Health and Care Wales, where she is Director of Primary, Community Care and Mental Health Digital Services. She says that recruitment can be harder, depending on what organisations are looking for. So there's a particular issue in technology around certain skills and technology. I'm hearing lots of feedback on things like open standards, open architecture, general architecture, cloud, they seem to be big struggles. In digital, it's everything from content to design to business analysts, there are people out there that you can recruit, but they're either very junior or they are priced out of the local government market, so there are people there but the prices, we're not paying enough basically, so we want ten years experience. But we're paying, we're paying graduate pay. On the question of retention, something's money is an important reason for people to move jobs, but not the only one. You know, we do exit interviews with people, and we chat to people that have left quite often, it will be money's the reason that they've gone. But there's also something around that career and opportunity, so I came from central government, we had very clear career pathways, people could come in as a junior associate and they could progress up to lead or principal and there was very clear pathway and a clear, you know, pay scale increase associated with it, that isn't the case in local government. Local authorities could try to establish better career structures, although that can be difficult given they are much smaller than the civil service. I've seen some taking a different approach. So some of the authorities, and one in particular is looking at it very differently, and they're saying, we know, we're not paying enough, we know we can't keep you for life, come on work with us for 18 months or two years and just give us something, and we'll give you some training and we'll give you some support and then you'll probably go off to something much more exciting and financially lucrative for you and we know that, but we'd rather have you for a year or two than not at all. As well as offering remote and hybrid working, Matt Asam mentioned some of the possible ways in which local public services could do better on recruitment and retention, including easier recruitment processes and looking to bring people in for just a few years. And local public services have strong stories to tell, both in general about service, local communities and specifically about their technology functions. The charity now teach, which works to attract people into teaching from other careers, could provide inspiration here, and there's potential for the sector to collaborate more, such as through shared marketing of local digital services as a career. As mentioned earlier, my full report is available to members on the Soxham website. I hope you found this podcast of interest and thanks for listening.