When the four-year moratorium on public service recruitment was lifted in 2013, it was no surprise to see a pent-up demand for graduate places, but since then the Public Appointments Service has continued to re-assert the public service even more successfully as an employer of choice for young graduates.
Thanks mainly to the launch of its new Gradpublicjobs.ie website in 2014, some 5,500 graduates applied for the civil service competitions last year compared to just over 3,000 in 2013 – moving towards an increase of 100 per cent.
“I think there is still some way to go but I would say we’re delighted with the increase in the number of applications in the campaign in 2014,” says Fiona Tierney, chief executive of the Public Appointments Service.
“It’s a lot to do with awareness, and it’s also a lot to do with consistency – that you’re there every year. So if you disappear off the radar for five years, people forget about you,” she says.
The service had anticipated that the recruitment of graduates would have to restart because of the rising age profile in the public sector, where the average age of employees is said to be the 40s.
“In 2013, we started to take a look at how would we plan our re-entry into the graduate market, because it’s a very interesting market and graduates are much more demanding than they used to be in terms of assessing the kinds of roles and careers that they want,” says Tierney.
“There are lots of discussions out there about the demands of ‘Generation Y’ and what they look for in careers.”
Graduate market
The result was a website totally focused on the graduate market. Gradpublicjobs.ie took the gong for Best Graduate Recruitment Website at the 2015 gradireland Graduate Recruitment Awards.
Tierney believes that the website won on the strength of its accessibility, clarity and ease of navigation, “but I think its key part that made it really big for us is that we’ve got real people telling real stories about what it’s like to work in the public service”.
These case studies have been selected to highlight the most attractive things about working in the public service, including the variety of roles and responsibilities, the flexibility to take career breaks and the opportunities for training and promotion.
The service is about to begin a brand new graduate development programme for all the recent hires that will be run in conjunction with the Irish Management Institute.
‘Huge energy’
Tierney says the service is even happier with the quality and calibre of the applications it has been getting, and with the 220 graduates that it has taken on so far in its current recruitment campaign.
Although many of these are older graduates with solid work experience behind them, many more are fresh out of college, which Tierney reports has injected a “huge energy” into many departments that have been deprived of new young talent over the last few years.
At the same time, it has been looking to attract experienced managers from outside the public sector and has held a competition for principal officers as well as for a number of senior specialist roles.
