North Tyneside Council share their experience of recruiting finance professionals from within the public and private sectors, highlighting the challenges and opportunities facing their organisation.
North Tyneside Council
North Tyneside Council is a metropolitan borough council in the North East of England. It is led by a directly elected mayor and provides essential public services to over 210,000 local people. It is a member of the North East Combined Authority and works closely with other local authorities across the Tyne and Wear county and the wider North East area.
The council seeks to operate an open and inclusive recruitment policy across its service areas. It recognises the value of diversity in its workforce and is keen to appeal to individuals from a broad range of backgrounds. This not only helps the council to recruit the most suitable people for each role, but also to have a workforce that is representative of the population that it serves and to discharge its role as a corporate parent effectively.
The council’s finance and resources directorate finds that applicants from outside local government generally have broadly similar skills to their local authority counterparts. And while a degree of local government expertise may be useful for certain roles, it is the council’s view that an individual’s attitude and ‘team fit’, rather than their previous work experience, are more reliable predictors of their success within the organisation.
The council also finds that recruits from other sectors can bring useful new perspectives and can ask questions that challenge sector norms and generate valuable insight.
At the moment, about half of new recruits to the council’s finance and resources directorate have a local government background and half come from other parts of the public sector or from the commercial sector.
Interestingly, the council is currently experiencing increased interest from candidates working in central government departments, with some based in government offices in the local area and others having taken advantage of Whitehall’s remote working arrangements to relocate to the North East.
In seeking to attract applicants for open positions, the council focuses on finding values-driven candidates who will be drawn to the public service ethos. Such individuals may already be looking for a new position, but they will probably not have considered a role in local government, and may not be looking in the usual places in which local authorities generally advertise their vacancies.
Consequently, while the council continues to post its vacancies on the traditional public sector-focused portals like North East Jobs, it also seeks to expand its reach by adopting non-traditional tactics. This includes promoting vacancies via the LinkedIn networks of relevant members of council staff, with the network effects of the platform allowing the council to reach vast numbers of potential applicants well beyond the local government sector.
The council is likewise keen to ensure that its selection processes are inclusive and that they do not favour individuals with any one particular background. The council has pared back its application form, for example, and now gives applicants the option to submit a CV and cover letter, rather than fill in a lengthy questionnaire.
Within the finance and resources directorate, the council seeks to interpret broadly the job and person specifications of roles to which it recruits, with a particular emphasis on candidates’ transferable skills. Interviews focus on open questions that allow candidates to speak in their own words about who they are and what they have done.
This allows the council to look beyond the specifics of each candidate’s previous employment to the bigger picture of their potential to thrive within the organisation.
More on financial recruitment
Find out more about our Financial Recruitment Project and read our case studies.
