Policy & Practice | Summer 2025

Talent Acquisition For any state or local agency, inevi tably operating with finite resources, attracting and retaining high-caliber people is an operational imperative. Positive employer branding can help raise awareness: Candidates new to the job market may not realize that positions might be available. For effec tive talent acquisition, leaders need to get each of the stages right, from demand planning and strategy design to candidate sourcing. n Demand planning is the first step for state and local agencies to realize the full scope of their recruiting needs. Understanding current vacancies, attrition, and succession plans help to inform the overall talent strategy, as well as the timing, sequence, and priori tization of overall recruiting and hiring activities. This process uses employee data to identify hiring needs, hard-to-fill positions, and employees likely to leave, which informs targeted hiring plans and schedules. n Strategy design involves creating a plan to tap new talent pools for critical hiring needs. The plan includes an evaluation of market conditions, sets hiring goals like boosting retention and developing a workforce with a diversity of expe rience and thought, and develops candidate profiles to maximize return on investment in sourcing, interviewing, and selection. n Candidate sourcing implements the foundation that demand planning and strategy design create, helping to stock the talent pipeline with qualified, interested, and available candidates. Continued engagement within the pipeline via personal ized communications and alerts can improve recruiting’s efficiency, increase candidate-to-employee con version, and help create a positive, informative, and transparent candi date experience. Faced with more than 2,000 vacan cies, Cook County Health (CCH) launched a significant recruitment initiative aimed at filling open posi tions across its expansive public health

system. This effort is part of a broader strategy to strengthen staffing in critical areas such as nursing, behav ioral health, correctional health, and administrative services. By aug menting the HR team with recruitment specialists, implementing full-cycle applicant management services, and streamlining the hiring process, CCH reduced its backlog of open positions, accelerated the average hiring time, and improved workload balance for the recruiting team. 9 Onboarding Recruiting is only the first step. Creating an intentional and tailored onboarding program sets the stage for new employees to hit the ground running, build institutional knowl edge, and quickly become operational in their roles. Research suggests that effective onboarding has a sizable return on investment, reducing quick attrition by acclimating employees to their new workplace culture. 10 Reimagining how to meaningfully onboard new staff involves the fol lowing steps: n Assess the current onboarding process. A thorough review of current practices, combined with in-depth business process analysis, can provide a sense of where the process stands and how it can be improved. Leaders can collect feedback via interviews, focus groups, and surveys to identify opportunities for automation and continued improvement and create channels for ongoing feedback loops. n Create a human-centered experience. Taking a human centered design approach is key to developing and implementing an onboarding process that will resonate with new hires. Human-centered design turns the traditional approach to problem solving inside out, starting with deeply understanding individuals’ unmet needs and using these insights to improve onboarding design and delivery. n Develop a new-hire curriculum. Agency leaders can collaborate with key stakeholders to bring to life a curriculum supporting a robust,

Will Arnold is a Managing Director in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s

Government & Public Services practice.

Michael J.Walsh is a Senior Manager in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Government & Public Services practice.

Abigail McNeal is a Manager in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Government & Public Services practice.

Tiffany Dovey Fishman is a Senior Manager with

Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights.

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