Department for Work and Pensions: Staff

(asked on 12th December 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to help improve (a) the quality of recruitment and (b) staff retention levels within his Department.


Answered by
Paul Maynard Portrait
Paul Maynard
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 19th December 2023

DWP is committed to improving its recruitment processes and improving candidate experience. The Resourcing Centre of Expertise has an ongoing work programme to ensure policy, guidance and tools support the business to fill high volumes of vacancies across a wide range of professions, grades, functions and locations. DWP work closely with recruitment suppliers, candidates and vacancy holders to identify ways to improve our processes and the quality of our recruitment outcomes.

DWP actively takes steps to promote and raise awareness of careers opportunities to increase attraction of diverse talent from the widest possible range of geographical, social, diversity and career backgrounds by:

  • Developing and launching corporate branding materials to support external recruitment activity and promote career opportunities in DWP to appeal to a broad range of applicants from entry level through to career changers and returners to the labour market. The branding provides consistent corporate attraction materials for DWP recruitment and is used on a range of social media, digital platforms and in outreach activities.
  • Promoting the DWP Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to the external labour market and widen the reach of DWP recruitment campaigns by promoting opportunities and employee stories on LinkedIn and the Civil Service Careers website.
  • Piloting use of diverse jobs boards which targets applicants with protected characteristics.
  • Delivering national communications campaigns for volume recruitment of critical Work Coach and Universal Credit Review roles.

Within the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, DWP use high quality selection tools which are centrally evaluated such as Civil Service online tests and video interviewing. Processes have been developed to increase the diversity of panel members and tested different approaches to evaluate their impact on diverse outcomes, inclusive candidate experience, and quality of hire.

The DWP People Strategy specifically sets out to ensure we offer fulfilling, rewarding careers that attract and retain motivated people. Most recently DWP have been implementing measures to increase retention by:

  • Using our people performance one to ones to increase awareness of partial retirement options, promoting options for part time employees to change their working pattern and using survey data to understand what is driving attrition trends and continue to create an environment where colleagues are highly motivated and retained.
  • By directly targeting all colleagues noted as leaving we have successfully increased the response rate to our leavers survey. We have revised the questions to provide more relevant insight and spoken to other Government Departments to learn from best practice.
  • Currently running a 3 month exit interview pilot in part of our operations to further build understanding of the reasons people are leaving the Department. As this will only be a proportion of the leavers that notify us during this period we will triangulate this data with other sources and additional business insight to ensure that we have a holistic picture upon which further action can be taken.
Reticulating Splines