Tuesday 18 August 2015

Auditing human resource appointments in Government Departments


People in government positions are regularly chosen for a publicly advertised  position in a pay grade above their current position.

Everyone within the government office has already chosen and committed to the appointment on the basis of feel alone. No matter who might be short-listed and interviewed, the existing staff member is promoted after all of the requirements stipulated by regulations (ie in law) have been seen to be done.

Even if a famously competent applicant was among the interviewed candidates (suitably disguised or even not), the existing employee would still get the position.

It's because managers often think that knowledge of their business is more important than any other knowledge or skills - even when their business is more simple than just about any operation of business anywhere else.

The position auditing requires that there be some standard tests applied across the board with double blind validity. Then anyone can audit and the system becomes self-auditing.

Like a standard management test (with domain variations) - each applicant would sit the test where only a code was used to identify the candidate. The adjudicators would then mark the tests and pick the superior candidate based on the scores. The code would then reveal who the winning candidate was.

Too many government offices are a seething mess of disasters for no other reason than a chain of incompetency is self-reinforcing - employing ever more incompetency hidden under budget blow-outs.

There is currently no true auditing of position appointments in many sections of government. There is "rubber-stamping" of failing to follow the spirit of the law.

In the end all government then becomes over-burdened with ineptitude simply because it might dress and talk well.

In the real world - only performance counts.

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