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Research · Prelim themes

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What & Why

The primary purpose of this research was to identify people’s motivations, behaviours, expectations, and experiences when accessing hiring & procurement services today (DTC and the broader ecosystem), and then to understand where they’re headed in an org design and digital talent acquisition context — inclusive of hiring and procuring.

• Knowing what’s important to them, what they’re trying to accomplish, and understanding the current state - what’s working (and why), and where the biggest pain points are (and the impact those pain points have), can tell us a lot about service opportunities for our branch moving forward!

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Our knowns/unknowns discovery activity plus 1:1 conversations with Product Owners and Design Researchers in the branch uncovered many questions and hypotheses:

• when, how, and why do people make the decisions they do when it comes to hiring and procurement, and what conditions and incentives might be influencing those decisions?

• what is the current level of knowledge and confidence re: agility, product development lifecycles, agile team formation, and digital professions? (unmet needs and service opportunities)

• what is the budget context of our clients seeking hiring and procurement supports as we explore cost-recovery models?

• how much demand for talent acquisition is there in the system? (in context of our capacity)

Themes & takeaways

On connecting the services

• Immediate connected-service opportunities aren’t jumping out at me, aside from some small experiments:

  • some assumptions were busted in this research, e.g. folks are pretty clear about why they hire or procure, I didn’t uncover an advice-gap so much as systemic blockers where optimal org design strategies may not be feasible in the current state of our system

    • many folks were clear that they’d love DTC’s help with those systemic issues, and other talent development/enabling strategies to help current talent succeed with impact

  • more scope/time is needed to analyze the blueprints of the respective services (archived during the Mural to Miro transition, may need to be re-created and updated) to identify cross-training opportunities

    • I’m mindful of workload/cognitive load and the distinct policy and therefore operational differences between hiring and procurement, and would want to proceed with caution - this may prove to be a blocker to cross-training staff

  • hiring is where the most demand is today, but our Talent program area has seen significant change in leadership/staffing and has put several products/programs on pause, while also considering new strategic directions - it would be helpful to stabilize that service before proceeding (order of operations), and/or see if Marketplace service staff want to cross-train and hop in to help with the hiring demand in the short term

On what our research uncovered

• Interview participants are articulating what a high stakes time this is, and that folks in digital roles achieving outcomes is a primary strategy for gaining/sustaining transformation buy-in and investment from Sr. Leaders - strong hires/vendors that are a good ‘fit’ for the work that needs to get done are critical in this moment in time

  • Before we go to far into “fit”… I am curious about the staff perspective on things not working out, when outcomes aren’t achieved.

  • Honouring how new these digital practices are: were the conditions in place to succeed? what’s the root cause?

  • Is it exclusively about hiring, or could some of the other themes that emerged around enabling digital practices (Chapters, development programs) play a role here?

• Folks are trending toward hiring-forward org strategies (“bring the brains back” TLee), but still greatly value vendors - hearing very intentional strategies and rationale to explore together re: when & why people hire vs. procure

  • bang for buck: vendors 2x the cost, with rates rising

  • core policy support for digital roles combined with high volume of quality job applications, at present

  • with business continuity/knowledge management top of mind - long term thinking, org health, sustainability

  • and a strategic preference toward hiring across the grid levels and growing folks, vs. exclusively brining folks in as 27s/30s

  • and some vendor trust issues lingering from historic outsourcing policies, where vendors are perceived to be incentivized around contracts vs. outcomes

• Strong theme around moving away from rigid/standalone teams toward blended orgs: “service thinking” e.g. digital folk collaborating with policy and program area roles to deliver that policy

• Good insights around what’s driving behaviour - fiscal year x time to hire is a big one, lots of factors beyond their control can create urgency to acquire talent, from new/changing gov priorities to leadership changes to supporting new legislation to seasonal factors (e.g. parks, emergency response, wildfire)

• Lots of detail shared around hiring and procuring nuances that I’ll need your help making sense of next week onwards

• “and more”