Where can we find the skills we don’t yet know we need?

I think there is a common misconception that recruitment is linear: raise a vacancy, post an advert on a job board, assess and select applicants, interview, offer, then onboard successful candidates – what I think of as the “sausage machine” (!). That specific process may be linear, but recruitment itself is a continuous, always-on cycle of engagement, attraction and sourcing. If you, as we do, want to become the employer of choice in certain regions and demographics, you need to stay one step ahead of your competitors, engaging past, present and future candidates in a way that means they think of you first.

It’s no secret that we have an ageing workforce. At HMRC, we know that we are likely to see many of the skills we need dropping out of our organisation over the next decade. If and when that happens, a neatly worded job ad isn’t going to suffice in ensuring we have the necessary skills to deliver on our strategic objectives and meet HMRC’s future organisational needs.

As recruiters, solving our current and anticipated resourcing challenges means taking charge of the narrative, going deeper with our insights, being present where we need to be present, and uncovering hidden pools of talent before they make their career choices.

The search for skills

I arrived at HMRC from the private sector seven years ago. At the time, the Civil Service wasn’t even on my radar – until my future manager did a great sales job and showed me why the Civil Service is such a great place to work. My objective was clear – to enable HMRC to be able to recruit over 800 digitally-skilled people into the IT function (Chief Digital Information Office - CDIO) to help deliver the next phase of the Making Tax Digital programme. My approach was to bring a private sector method to recruitment into the Civil Service, which was at the time, a very regimented environment.

In that first year, we made significant changes to the approaches taken to recruit new people, and how recruitment was then viewed across the organisation. After successfully delivering over 600 new employees for CDIO in that first year, I then took on the bigger role of delivering recruitment for the whole of HMRC, just at the time when we needed to start delivering extra resources for Brexit. After successfully delivering these and, subsequently, the extra Covid resources required to support the delivery of the Government Pandemic Schemes, we then focused on looking at Talent Acquisition more strategically to reflect the future skills needs of HMRC. This is a huge ongoing piece of work and is intended to ensure we have the right people, with the right skills, in the right locations across the UK, to enable HMRC to meet its business objectives for the next 5-7 years plus. As part of this work there are two areas of focus.

Firstly, how do we mitigate the loss of the skills in our ageing demographic? And secondly, how do we identify and find the skills we need for the future? Through the advent of different data sets available to us, it allows us to use a combination of data-led insights and targeted engagement activity to help us reach our short and long-term goals.

Uncovering hidden pools of talent

We are fortunate to have 14 regional centre locations across the whole of the UK. Over the next few years, we want to become one of, if not the biggest employers of choice in each of our regions, enabling HMRC to attract talent to the organisation organically over time.

When we talk about recruitment, many people assume that the best place to look for jobs is on job boards, social networks like LinkedIn and other areas such as our own personal networks. But I think that some of the best opportunities to discover new talent happen in the places we don’t normally think to look.

When considering new talent sources, we use a number of data insights to help us fully understand the geographic area we are focusing on. That could be ONS data (from the latest Census), regional data analysis, survey and research data as well as LinkedIn Insights. Previously, this has helped us uncover and engage pools of talent that may otherwise not have even considered a career with HMRC. As an example, around one of our regional centres, we discovered a large, well-educated, and skilled community that only had a 1% representation in that specific office location. We used these insights to reach out into the community to try and understand why HMRC was not a favoured employer for them. It transpired that there was a huge misconception that all we did was collect tax, which was a large blocker. By then educating this group on the wide range of professions and different types of jobs we offer, we were able to unlock a potentially large talent pool for future recruitment.

Telling people what they might not know

People have an idea of the sort of career they can have within HMRC – but the truth is, you can do and be almost anything you want to with a career in both HMRC and the wider Civil Service. People may well have the perception that as the tax authority, all we do is collect tax, but we have opportunities across nearly every profession you can imagine. We just need to be able to tell people that, share our stories and show all the great things that we do in HMRC. Our new EVP that launches this spring will allow us to provide a showcase of why HMRC is a Great Place To Work in a way that many people will be both surprised and attracted to.

We are also massively diverse across the whole organisation, with regional centres sitting within many different communities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each regional centre has its own identity – and we embrace that.

Throwing out the sausage machine

I want to encourage people to take a step back and think differently about sourcing and recruitment. We can’t afford to become complacent about attraction and the candidate experience at every point in the recruitment journey.

To ensure we have the skills we need, both now and in the future, we need to be ambitious in our goal of being an employer of choice in each of our regions. We must facilitate the engagement of employees throughout their HMRC recruitment journey as much as possible, whether they’re thinking about their career for the first time, or deciding whether to go for that internal promotion. It’s time to throw out the sausage machine style of recruiting and deliver an integrated, inclusive and enjoyable candidate experience for every person who wishes to work for HMRC.

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