The public sector doesn't have a hiring problem.
It has a keeping problem, a planning problem and a systems problem, all at once. Each one makes the others worse.
We fix the workforce model and the people systems around it. Culture, communications, employer brand, hiring, workforce and development: one connected view of human capital, measured against productivity.
This isn't a cycle. It's structural.
And local government reorganisation is forcing councils to merge HR functions and systems at pace. None of this resolves on its own: workforce planning in the public sector now means designing for permanent shortage, not waiting out a bad year.
The model and the machinery.
Every item below is scoped in the Workforce Diagnostic before anything is committed.
- Workforce planning and the permanent/contingent mix — demand, supply, attrition and cost modelled against the curriculum or service plan, with a deliberate strategy for hard-to-fill roles rather than a rolling emergency.
- Retention economics — what attrition actually costs you, and which levers pay back. Pay is one lever; workload, progression and management are usually cheaper ones.
- Agency spend reduction — a costed route from agency dependence to a sustainable staffing model, sequenced so service and teaching never drop while the mix changes.
- Culture and communications — culture treated as an operational subject (what gets measured, tolerated and rewarded), and the internal communications that decide whether any change survives contact with the staffroom.
- Hiring capability — process, assessment and tooling for hard-to-fill public sector roles, built in-house so you stop renting it from agencies.
- Employer brand and EVP — the honest answer to why someone good would come here and why they would stay, found from your own people, your leavers and the candidates who turned you down, not from a values poster.
- Putting the proposition to work — job adverts, the careers page, interviews and the first ninety days all saying the same thing, with hiring managers who can tell it in their own words. Measured in applications per vacancy, offer acceptance and first-year attrition.
- Development that pays back — progression and CPD tied to the retention economics. The cheapest hire is the one you didn't have to make.
- HR and payroll system selection and implementation — vendor-neutral, and we don't take referral fees. Requirements written from the decisions you need to make, not from feature lists.
- HR capacity building for reorganisation and merger — when a trust acquires a school or councils combine, the HR function absorbs the shock. We build the capacity and the process before it lands.
You're already paying for the fix. It's just spread across workarounds.
We find that spend in the Diagnostic and design it out. Source: Zellis survey of 500 public sector managers, via LocalGov, July 2024.
This strand maps your people data as it goes.
That map is where Data & Insight starts: the warehouse begins with the people data this work has already joined up.