The Department for Child Protection and Family Support (CPFS) in Western Australia has in excess of 2,500 full-time and part-time staff and a hugely diverse workforce of whom more than 30% are located in country areas. CPFS also has a professionalised workforce, with over 1,300 positions requiring degree-qualified social workers, psychologists or other specific human services qualified staff.
The business need
CPFS has been an EmpowerHR customer for over 18 years. Recently it decided to explore how the EmpowerHR system could cater for some of the business issues around position establishment and vacancies.
Recruitment and Establishment Management can be important for many organisations as it can be the key measure for funding or overall budget management requirements. As well as this, the benefits of a strong recruitment process not only need to create efficiency, but also need to ensure the right people are hired.
Complex issues to be managed
Key issues facing CPFS included individualised recruitment processes, administered manually, across a large geographical spread, combined with a high number of vacancies to manage, and minimal administration staff available to perform labour intensive activities. The Department had no strategic view of vacancy management activities, or the ability to identify recruitment issues.
In order to build a solution to cater for these requirements, the Department worked closely with Fusion5 to develop the software and required business processes. This resulted in a simple On-line Establishment and Vacancy Management System, using Empower-HR as the single source of truth for the data. The interactive functionality enabled business units to provide regular updates on status, which in turn provided aggregate reports at a corporate level, and the system itself ensured that processes were standardised across the board.
Benefits realised
CPFS now enjoy a range of benefits from this on-line solution; department-wide vacancies have decreased by half, business unit managers now have the knowledge and responsibility to update information, HR are able to monitor vacancy management activities and intervene where more targeted recruitment strategies are required, and the improved analysis capability and resulting understanding of vacancy issues at corporate level allows a more strategic approach to be identified, strategies developed and implemented. There is now a transparent, single source of truth for information data across the Department, and with management controls and standardised guidelines in place, decision making at a local level is further enabled.
