Richard Tyrie, co-founder of online talent management provider JGP

Employers across Britain face a recruitment crisis so how can councils reach out to the so-called Generation Y?

The Audit Commission’s recent report, “Tomorrow’s People” highlighted the skills gaps that exist across the UK private sector and, in particular, in local government, where nearly one third of local government personnel set to retire over the next decade. Here is a demographic shift that, left unanswered, could undermine government’s ability to deliver services to local people altogether.

Digital recruitment strategies - gen Y

In this alarming situation, local government needs to revolutionise its approach to attract the best talent. Local authorities must take radical measures such as setting up entire digital recruitment strategies that reach out to and understand young people’s vocational aims as well as their strikingly online and social media-based habits. Unless the sector does this, it will struggle to adequately maintain, build and upskill its 1.5 million workforce with the under 30s. This approach is also vital to support the continued modernisation of local service delivery that was kick started by the Government a decade ago.

Everyone appreciates the reach of the online world but when the Internet Advertising Bureau recently recorded a 38% growth in revenues for 2007, much of it from online recruitment, it was a landmark. It showed that the momentum towards online recruitment systems is irreversible.

Employer branding -recruitment channels to attract gen Y

As a result of this shift, whatever the type of employer you are, attracting and maintaining a younger workforce – the ‘Generation Y’ers or Echo boomers - will increasingly be about building a mix of online channels and engineering business processes to harness those channels’ power and ability to appeal to individual people. The inescapable demographic shift, with far fewer younger people entering the UK workforce, makes such radical changes a necessity.

Local government employers are going to have to transform their approach in three main ways:

• Branding
• Systems
• Processes

Local authorities need to build their authentic brands

First, local authorities must transform the way they are perceived as potential employers, They will have to develop ways to build an authentic brand experience with different age groups. These days, local councils have to compete with high street brands or the global brand store down the road that offers a flexible approach and good training scheme. Councils must show they’re better and more rewarding to work for particular for young people who want to support their community.

Local government to turn old style processes on it's head

Second, local government is going to have to turn its old-style recruiting systems on their head. They will have to replace the old-fashioned ‘application form’ mindset with greater openness about what it means to be and work in local government. They will have to understand and use tools like workplace blogs to show the inside, or staging interactive chats and forums with potential recruits.

Digital channels

This isn’t a pipedream, either. The best employers have successfully used online tools and self-completion forms to make the application process itself much more fun and informative. Ironically, this urgent need to ‘reach out’ to Generation Y candidates applies equally to older recruits: 50-somethings may want a fresh challenge and arguably are more adept at identifying opportunities online than younger age groups. Councils must therefore build digital channels and reach out to them too. 

The third aspect doesn’t sound very sexy but it is still vital – councils need to re-engineer their recruitment processes to attract the best candidates. What does that entail? Well, a number of forward-looking authorities, especially some of the London boroughs, are using tools like online forms, talent pools and social media sites as recruiting channels.

These channels are in a sense, the ‘front end’, the public face of digital recruitment, but of course they will increasingly be configured to deliver highly effective recruitment databases for local government employers – with information shared by different councils and vital posts filled efficiently.

The way forward for public sector recruitment

There’s a long way to go, but the best councils are sharing information better, doing away with old-fashioned paper-based processes or repeat job advertisements, and many have streamlined processes for local authorities to target and recruit the best available talent.  This process efficiency but also the ability to reach out better to Generation Y, and influence and shape the local communities they serve, has to be the goal for public sector recruitment.