Public Sector & Diversity
The Public Appointments Service (PAS) is the centralised recruitment service for the civil service in Ireland; this includes government bodies, local authorities, Health Service Executive, An Garda Síochána, Prison Services, Vocational Educational Committees, Fisheries, and other related sectors. The civil service in Ireland does not appropriately represent the current level of ethnic diversity in the population. Research shows that for the public service to serve effectively, it must accurately reflect ethnic diversity in that population.
Project Brief
This project aims to research and explore ways of increasing ethnic diversity in the PAS, specifically around the awareness and engagement of Chinese citizens in Ireland with the public appointment service. The PAS is in a unique competitive position among recruiters in Ireland and is differentiated by the types of roles it offers.The defining of the project brief showed a need to encourage the Chinese EEA Citizens in Ireland to apply for Public & Civil service jobs. To achieve this, the following areas must be tackled: awareness of their eligibility for PAS roles, knowledge of www.publicjobs.ie existence, and promotion of the benefits of working with Public Service.
Chinese Population in Ireland The PAS has the unique position of being the only centralised recruiter for civil service jobs in Ireland. Barney’s (1991) resource-based view asserts that providing a service that cannot be offered by rivals is vital for competitive advantage. This is key to differentiating the PAS from the many recruiters in Ireland.
Design Thinking
The project brief determined that the target persona demographic would be an Asian person with EEA citizenship; an investigation was required to gauge their awareness of and engagement with the PAS. Primary research carried out by the project team was collected using a questionnaire.
The survey was devised from the project brief and problem statement; questions were created to address awareness and engagement with the PAS, including eligibility to work in public service, area of interest, Public Jobs awareness and marketing channels. Based on these findings and the project objectives, a persona was created that represented a native from China – a qualified Chinese nurse whose ideal role would be in the HSE.
Problem statement: To assist the Public Appointments Service to attract Chinese EEA citizens to the Civil and Public Service.
Based on the personas’ goals and frustrations, the project team brainstormed ideas to help find out about and engage with the PAS – 41 ideas were generated. Similar ideas were categorised together, and the following headings and features emerged. The most robust Technology theme was selected for further development.
A mock-up website prototype was created to demonstrate the new features from the Ideation stage. This was based on the existing PAS website and is shown in the figures below:
The prototype website was shown to 14 Asian people, who were asked for their thoughts and opinions about the usefulness and value of the new features. Their feedback is collated in the table below:
Survey Primary Research Methodology
Primary research data was collected using a questionnaire to gain insight into the awareness, opinions, and possible barriers of Chinese EEA citizens engaging with the PAS. The questionnaire was devised from the project brief and problem statement and administered using two methods: online using SurveyMonkey and face-to-face.
An inductive approach was chosen to analyse the qualitative results of the questionnaire. Saunders Etal (2009, p. 490) states that this method is used to explore the collected data and discover emerging themes. As per their process, an initial data analysis allowed categories to be identified for each question. Then, various respondents’ answers were collated into the relevant categories to determine the prevalence of each theme.
