Case Study - Managing talent

It's all about talent - attracting it, retaining it and managing it effectively and thanks to two cutting edge e-projects with Jobsgopublic, Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council is leading the way in the quest for talent.

The first project, JobsDoncaster, is a web based portal linking job seekers to job opportunities with different public sector employers.

“JobsDoncaster”, said Steve Dungworth, Doncaster MBC's Web Portal Manager, “will enable public sector employers such as the council, Doncaster College, the airport and the NHS, to advertise all their job vacancies on one web site.

“This will enable us to work collaboratively and concentrate on attracting talent by selling the public sector and Doncaster as a great place to work, rather than on competing with each other”.

The potential advantages of the site are enormous, according to Steve.

He said: “The cost savings alone could be incredible and with e-recruitment, uninspiring adverts will be a thing of the past. Instead you will have a blank canvas on which to sell the public sector. We will also be able to pool talent between organisations so that talented but unsuccessful candidates can be picked up within the sector and not lost”.

The second project, a Skills Portal, which is an innovative e-solution to workforce planning, is also at the vanguard of technology.

The Skills Portal allows you to map the skills and competencies of your workforce against your current and future requirements, identifying skills gaps, which can then be met by recruitment or training. The resulting organisational skills map will also allow you to manage talent better by enabling you to quickly draw on expertise throughout the organisation for specific projects.

The council's Corporate Director of Human Resources & Organisational Development, Mandy Coalter said: “Doncaster MBC is going through a major restructure with 1000s of people being moved into new positions. We needed to look at the skills and competencies of our current employees and compare them with the requirements of the new jobs.

“JGP created the Skills Portal for us, where individuals identify their own skill set, which is verified by their managers. From this we can work out where the best matches are”.

The portal was piloted with 100 or so staff from the council's pay and employment section and was, according to Mandy, a “fantastic success”.

Mandy said: “Staff were nervous about the changes and did not want to have to go through an internal interview process. We used the Skills Portal to help match staff with their new jobs. People were really pleased with the result, there were no interviews and the service is already improving”.

Mandy is now looking to roll out the pilot to the council's other 14,000 staff.

“We currently have no good analysis of our staff's skills and as a result we are not fully utilising our talent base. I want to integrate the portal with our performance appraisal process and set up proper systematic workforce planning. This will take into account not only the skills and competencies needed now, but those that we will need in the future. This will enable us to manage our talent better and improve service provision across the board”.

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