Making government recruitment effective online

This post in Shifted HR reflects an area I have my eye on - Recruitment in the Australian Public Service

In Allison's words:

HR areas in APS agencies need to stop focusing on the process of recruitment and use technology to do this. They should be focusing their energy in supporting, educating and training line managers on recruitment strategy, attraction and candidate management.

Coming from the private sector I am used to organisations having effective online recruitment systems. These remove unnecessary manual steps in applying for jobs, managing applications, communicating with applicants and filtering job seekers by abilities.

I'd like to upgrade the systems at my agency when we can give it appropriate attention.

What has been your experience in rolling out systems to support the recruitment process at your organisation?

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Managing the 'grey hair' drain

A big issue in government, as in the private sector, is the drain of experienced older people as they decide to change lifestyles.

Dow has followed an interesting strategy of developing an alumni social network, which helps keep ex-employees - both retirees and others - linked into the organisation.

This keep their experience on tap and can also serve as a pool of potential recruits back to the organisation.

Given how important the aging of Australia's public service has become on the APS agenda, I'd be interested whether any agencies are considering strategies like this one to help them manage future trainsitions.

Dow's article: "My Dow Network" Provides Dow People with New Way to Connect

Thanks to Web Strategy by Jeremiah for this link in his post, Gen Y Enter Stage Left, Baby Boomers Exit Stage Right.

Note that with new intranet social media tools being developed by Microsoft and LinkedIn, Dow's approach may become very cost-effective in the future, linking into people's existing online social networks.

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Do all your egovernment tools meet accessibility standards?

In Australia website usability is important, but accessibility is law.

While most government agencies are extremely diligent about meeting accessibility requirements it is also important to look at the accessibility of any online tools they use that affect their customers or clients.

For example, my agency uses a third-party email marketing system, Vision6 for electronic newsletters to customers and a US-based survey tool, SurveyMonkey for customer and stakeholder surveys.

Vision6 is an Australian company and has met all applicable accessibility requirements for a long time. We also make a point of offering plain text versions of all HTML emails we distribute through this tool to further ensure we're providing an email version that customers can readily access.


SurveyMonkey, being a US system, isn't required by law to meet Australian accessibility standards - although it meets the applicable W3C guidelines on which this was based.

Previously we used this service as no other web survey platform I had identified met the agency's requirements and was fully Australian standards compliant.

However they have just been certified as compliant with the US's Section 508 Accessibility requirements, which, according to SurveyMonkey, makes them the only online survey application that is Section 508 certified, as explained in their website, Your survey designs are now 508 compliant!

This isn't an Australian standard, however it is a very long way towards meeting it.


If you're unsure what the Australian requirements are, AGIMO's Accessibility section provides a concise and clear explanation.

If you're not sure how to test for accessibility, WebAIM has a good list of accessibility testing tools and when/how to use them.

Incidentally, the W3C is getting much closer to the second version of their accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) - after 5 years of work.

Webcredibility have a review of the new version in their site at WCAG 2.0: The new W3C accessibility guidelines evaluated.

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A different way to look at agency customers

My agency spends a lot of money learning about our customers with the goal of identifying how to provide them with better services.

These research processes quite often lead to huge presentations full of statistics that attempt to explain customer intentions and motivations.

If you have a maths bent, these presentations speak very loudly - however they don't always translate well for others and can be difficult to absorb and interpret.

An approach that I find is very eloquent is to imagine that you have only 100 customers living in a village and look at their conditions, hopes and aspirations in this framework.

This has been used with great effect by Miniature Earth - which takes this concept and applies it to the entire globe.

There's also an application of it to companies, looking at large corporations or agencies from the same perspective of a 100 person village.

Brought to my attention by Steve Collin's Thoughtglue blog, you can view it at: McDaniel Partners: Are You Effectively Managing Your Most Important Asset?.

So using this concept for your customers, what do they look like, and where are they going?

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The issues with CAPTCHA security

CAPTCHA is a security technology for websites that works by making users verify they are a human by typing in a random string of letters or numbers displayed in an image.

You could consider it a Turing test for humans.

It is now widely used as it is easy to implement and has a reasonably good success rate in differentiating human and machine.

However it does have weaknesses and issues, and organisations need to think a little before they simply decide on the CAPTCHA path.

Here's some factors to consider.

CAPTCHA isn't accessible - straight CAPTCHA may breach accessibility law

CAPTCHA relies on presenting a graphic image of text to a viewer, who then reads the text and enters it into a text box. As computers are now smart enough to read clear images, the images used in modern CAPTCHA systems are usually 'messy' with random strokes and distorted letters (called reCAPTCHA).

For example:

These images can also be hard for some humans to read - the old, the young, the visually-impaired and even groups who would not consider themselves as having sight issues.

This means that visual CAPTCHA systems may be inaccessible under Australian laws regarding accessibility. This is a very important consideration for Australian government agencies.

There are approaches to get around this, such as either offering a selection of images, one of which (hopefully) is readable by the audience; or through offering an audio alternative, whereby someone listens to a series of letters or numbers - usually interspersed with other sounds - and types these in.

Note that the latter approach also has similar accessibility issues for those with hearing impairments.

Personally I have on occasion had difficulty using either a visual and audio CAPTCHA approach and my vision and hearing are both above average for my age group (Gen X).

CAPTCHA is breakable

There are several ways to break a CAPTCHA system.

The first is to simply have a large group of low paid computer users systematically interpret and type in the correct response.

Organisations in nations where labour is cheap are able to offer this as a service for hacking sites or preparing the way for automated systems to then use hacked sites and accounts for spamming and other illicit purposes.

Also as technology improves it becomes easier for machines to break CAPTCHA. Already we've seen a move from clear text to messy and distorted images - tested against optical character recognition to ensure they are not readable - in order to reduce the ability for computers to read the image.

It is only a matter of time before machines can also read these messy images - handwriting recognition and optical character recognition technology both continue to get better and are converging on this area.

Not endorsed by the W3C

CAPTCHA is not endorsed for use by the W3C.

The W3C has indicated in a working paper entitled Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA that CAPTCHA is inaccessible and the technology is not yet endorsed within W3C guidelines.

This means that it is not endorsed within the standard guidelines underpining website development in the public sector.

This doesn't exclude agencies from using it - it has not been specifically rejected by the W3C, it sits in a gray area and each agency would have to make their own decision.

So what next?

CAPTCHA has already advanced to reCAPTCHA - involving the messy distorted text indicated above.

Most reCAPTCHA implementations have also integrated audio reCAPTCHA as an alternative - in the hope that if people cannot read the image they can understand the sounds.

Some organisations, such as banks, use physical PIN devices, others have talked about using fingerprint or retina scanners attached to PCs.

However there is no clear successor to reCAPTCHA for widespread use on websites.

What should organisations do?

As there's no readily accessible and cost-effective alternative, organisations should strongly consider reCAPTCHA as a security measure in their sites, integrating both visual and audio approaches.

However they should also strongly consider offering an approach accessible to those who cannot see or hear the CAPTCHA security, such as phone-based identification or the use of secret questions.

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