Case Study - DHHS Tasmania

Department of Health and Human Service in Tasmania

Company description:

The Department of Health and Human Service (DHHS) is the largest government organisation in Tasmania responsible for providing a wide range of health and community services to the Tasmanian public. These services include four public hospitals, rural health facilities, public housing, ambulance, child & youth health facilities, mental health and disability services, oral health centres and youth justice facilities. All together there are 13 business units in 300 locations throughout Tasmania which employ over 10,500 staff.

Justin Giles-Clark is the manager of business improvement for HR. Recruitment for the entire business is managed by a 10-person team.

Recruitment challenge:

The organisation recruits between 1600 and 2000 jobs every year. The turnaround time to fill a position was 95 calendar days. This was far too long, particularly when it is becoming more difficult to fill specialist positions.

The organisation wanted to find a way where it could reduce the job fill time, reduce the administration and move from a manual process to online.

The solution:

The organisation went through a tender process to find the best solution provider. While there were a number of competitors from which to choose, PageUp offered the best solution and was also the best fit in terms of values.

"We felt very comfortable with PageUp. We like their ethos. The value they could add and what they were prepared to do were all positive comments that came from the tender panel," says Mr Giles-Clark.

DHHS chose PageUp's product and integrated the platform 2-years ago. The organisation uses all the technology components offered to recruit and select new staff. These include: event schedules, reports, surveys, applicant matching module and job board uploads.

The flexibility of the system also allows variations to suit the organisation. Being a government body, the organisation has certain recruitment obligations it must meet, one of which is to advertise its jobs on www.jobs.tas.gov.au website. The flexibility of the system enables the organisation to export the job ad straight onto the job board in exactly the same way as uploading an advertisement on Seek.

Although it took no time to integrate the technology into DHHS's existing platform, it has taken 18 months to roll out the system across the 13 different business units due to the diversity of each business unit and their requirements.

Results:

The integration of PageUp has been an enormous success for the organisation. Not only has it reduced the turnaround time to 95 and 65 days and the time is still dropping, it has enabled the HR department and the business units to reconcile and re-engineer its entire recruitment process, as well as put the responsibility of recruitment back with the areas that need staff. The technology's ease of use has made this possible and enabled HR to provide greater value in the recruitment process.

"PageUp was more than just a technology supplier. They are always looking at how they can improve their product for their clients. In the past we were playing catch up. Now we're on top of our recruitment and improving everyday" says Mr Giles-Clark.

Justin also mentions that one of the benefits of the technology is that it is now easier for them to tap into a global health professional market to find staff. With such shortages, particularly in areas such as medical and nursing, there is a real need to search outside of Tasmania.