Stephen Moir

The full effects of the economic downturn on Stephen Moir’s public sector domain at Cambridgeshire County Council are still largely a gathering storm. But overflow from the private sector’s recessionary fallout has already spilt onto the council’s stately doorstep.

The number of job applications for roles there are up by 50% over the last year, Moir tells Recruiter in a conversation at picturesque Shire Hall in Cambridge. Interest in the nine graduate trainee positions with the council is up even more significantly, with applications up 70% for the three general management trainee positions alone.

Moir, corporate director for people, policy and law, laughs ruefully at the widely-held perception that the public sector is a safe employment haven: “There’s a huge myth about working in the public sector, and people just make assumptions that ‘oh, you’re all right, you never make anyone redundant, you never downsize’. Rubbish. I’ve never known the public sector to be safe in the time I’ve worked in it. Take my own experience in Cambridgeshire.

“I’m on my third role in four years. I’ve been fortunate enough to be appointed each time, as it wasn’t just a case of ‘we’re going to give you more to do’[due to restructuring]. I’ve personally been at risk of redundancy twice while working for Cambridgeshire because I’ve had to apply for new roles. Even up until my new role in April this year, I was under notice of redundancy until I secured that job.”

Warming to his subject, he continues: “The public sector is no safer than any other part of the country or any other part of the economy - in reality, change is a constant in working in public service - there is no such thing as a safe haven, just a different part of the economy.”


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Moir, the past president and honorary treasurer of the Public Sector People Managers’ Association (PPMA), has held his triple-threat post since April. Previous to that, his title was merely double-barreled; he was responsible for people and policy. He joined Cambridgeshire County Council in 2005 with the simple moniker of HR director.

His current job title must certainly be one of the most onerous within a local authority. “The way the job’s described, it almost sounds like I have to have three bits of my mind turning to different things,” Moir acknowledges jovially. However, he adds, “recruitment for me…is actually the most important part of the business, and the most important part of the team”.

“If we don’t have the right people in our own workforce, if we don’t get the right people with the right skills at the right time, we won’t service the needs of Cambridgeshire’s population, and we won’t look after how the organisation needs to change - so recruitment is absolutely critical for me.”

Today the recruitment portion of his job involves “quite an interesting mixture of hands-on recruitment and setting overall strategy, direction and managing performance of recruitment and resourcing”, he says, across the council’s 18,000 employees and 69 elected county councillors who serve 597,000 constituents. He is the council’s adviser on senior appointments. Last year, he was instrumental in the recruitment and hire of the county’s most senior appointed employee, chief executive Mark Lloyd.

When it comes to recruitment issues, Cambridgeshire is mapping its own course on a variety of fronts. Eighteen months ago, CCC launched its own five-person in-house agency workers recruitment team, which manages a framework contract with a range of agencies to place temporary hires and interim placements across the authority. “I had some concerns around agency spend and best use of public money,” Moir explains.

To date, CCC has realised a rebate income of £108,000 and savings from temporary to permanent hire costs of £165,000 as a result. Current agency margins paid by the council average 10-15% for most positions, but are more - “around 18-20%”, Moir says - for social care placements.

The council even operates its own revenue-generating job board, jobsincambs.com, in which it invested 75% of the start-up costs, while Cambridge City Council contributed the remaining 25%. Jobsincambs’ revenues are modest, around £3,375 in total since it launched in January 2007, but Moir says: “We have dramatically reduced our cost per hire on advertising mainly due to signposting adverts.”

He offers the following figures: from 1 April 2006 to 31 March 2007, cost per hire was £814.90, falling to £638.21 per hire between May 2007 and April 2008, and then falling again to £448.39 per hire in the year ending 30 April 2009.

And there are big plans afoot for jobsincambs.com. Moir says: “We’re also trying to get the police, fire and rescue, and the NHS in Cambridgeshire to use it as a mini-portal because ideally, we’d like the Cambridgeshire sub-region to have jobsincambs as the public sector gateway for all the jobs you can go for.”

The recruitment team serving the whole organisation is 12 people, averaging the recruitment for 1,000 posts, in terms of relative turnover levels. “We manage that pretty well. The average length of time from advert to offer being made is just over 33 days,” Moir says. The time-to hire statistics are good, he acknowledges, “really good - not just for public sector but good across the board. When I joined four years ago, we were running at about 44 days. So we put a lot of effort into improving the hire turnaround.”

Moir began his career in the private sector, working I’m not there anymore,” he says. His father had also worked in financial services and his mother for the public sector. When his parents retired, Moir says: “Dad was delighted to be able to get out of his job; mum was absolutely distraught leaving her work. That’s because when they decided to retire, dad had become completely disengaged from his organisation, didn’t necessarily agree with what it was all about and what it stood for. My mum had absolutely got the public sector ethos. Having done a short stint in financial services, I absolutely understood where my dad was coming from, and then having moved into the public sector, I absolutely understood where my mum was coming from.”

Whether it’s the ‘public sector ethos’ or the commitment to existing staff, or both, something is resonating with CCC’s workforce. Results from the 2009 employee survey indicated an overall employee satisfaction level of 78%, a 5% increase on 2007, and compared with an Ipsos MORI overall employer norm of 63% for public and private sector employers.

Adds Simon Atkinson, Ipsos MORI managing director: “The all round picture is the most positive we have recorded for any local authority in recent years. Indeed many of the council’s scores are among the Top 10 of any organisation surveyed by Ipsos MORI.”

Moir is understandably proud of the results. But he believes it is all in the quest to serve a greater good. “I absolutely know that decisions I make on a day-to-day basis, or decisions I influence and advise on… have a direct impact on the community we serve,” he says.

It’s all about customer focus, he adds.

 

“And for me, it doesn’t really matter what part of the organisation you work within, even if your customers are internal colleagues you have to understand how what you do impacts ultimately on the people who pay your wages, which is the community.- the public”

 

Curriculum Vitae
Home town:
Edinburgh
Current role: Corporate director (people, policy and law), since April 2009
Joined Cambridgeshire Council Council as HR director in 2005
Previous roles
in both local authorities and the police service
Credentials include: Masters degree in personnel management with IT; Chartered Fellow of the CIPD; Fellowships with the Chartered Management Institute and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)

Organisational Profile
Cambridgeshire County Council
serves 600,000 residents, has 18,000 employees (excluding school staff) and 69 councillors
Budget £327m
Main city and towns Cambridge (main city), Huntingdon, Ely, March, Wisbech, St Neots
Cost of HR as percentage of total paybill 2.26%


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