The Department’s workforce planning capability is maturing as an integral component of the overall planning cycle. Ensuring the workforce is flexible, engaged and has the capabilities required to meet emerging issues remains a priority.

Finance acknowledges the impact and importance of collaboration and engagement with each of the business groups to inform and implement relevant workforce strategies and its approach to workforce planning reflects this. The Department schedules regular Strategic Review meetings as a key mechanism to measure progress and identify new improvement initiatives. These meetings are an important element of Finance’s Integrated Business Planning approach, connecting workforce planning to the budget and business planning cycles.

Finance is committed to building and supporting its workforce to be professional, accountable and responsive, with programs in place to drive high quality leadership outcomes.

Finance pays particular attention to employee feedback from the APS Employee Census to drive strategic, business and action planning. In 2018–19, 94.4 per cent of staff responded to the Census, giving the Department a clear insight into the diversity and experience of Finance’s workforce. Engagement, wellbeing and innovation scores were strong, all showing a continuous improvement trajectory from previous years, with the Census information being analysed and used to plan and support future workforce initiatives.

Sourcing Strategy

Finance’s people sourcing strategy supports the Department’s approach to workforce planning. Finance uses a range of sourcing options to attract the right people with the right skills in a timely way. In particular, it uses the BRING strategy, which focuses on sourcing new talent and includes specific initiatives to address identified workforce gaps.

Figure 7: Finance's sourcing strategy

Key Objectives

• Attracting quality candidates and engaging them early in their career through effective recruitment processes
• Mobilising Finance staff in a timely manner and with streamlined processes
• Bringing quality people into the Department through Finance’s registers, merit pools and specialist recruitment processes

Core Principles

• Quality at speed—reduce the time it takes to fill vacant roles without losing quality candidates
• Right people—attract quality candidates with the right capabilities and who offer increased diversity of skills and experiences and the opportunity to challenge our way of thinking
• Efficiency—simplify the assessment and selection methodology to reduce the impost on business resources
• Flexibility—use flexible sourcing strategies that give business areas a range of options when filling vacant roles