Recruiting by numbers: Singapore to use analytics to shape its workforce

Singapore will use analytics to better manage its public sector workforce, including to plan hiring and training of civil servants.

“We are developing an analytics solution to facilitate better strategic workforce planning in the public sector,” Sivakumaran Sathappan, Chief Information Officer, of Public Service Division told GovInsider.

Analytics will help the agency understand what types of skill sets the public sector workforce will need in the future, he said.

“If we have the right competencies, the public sector will be more efficient. Otherwise, we can identify the competency areas that we need to develop further,” Sathappan said.

The Public Service Division will also use data to predict what factors contribute to people leaving the public sector, and how the government can manage these better.

The agency will look at what encourages people to work in the public sector, and which groups of people are at the highest risk of leaving it.

Based on these patterns, the government can make more strategic decisions on public sector training and recruitment.

“We have limited resources and demand on the public sector is increasing, so we need to do more with fewer resources,” he said.

“If we can better plan the workforce, we will be able to better react to challenges.”

The analytics tool will be ready for use by the second half of this year and will ultimately be rolled out to all ministries in the government, he said.

The project is being led by a team of 10 from the agency’s Strategic Planning Unit and Information Technology Department, including data scientists, researchers, and planners.

“They are the business owners. They have the expertise on what parameters they want to analyze and what recommendations to make,” Sathappan said.

The team has partnered with a private sector company, to whom it has just awarded the tender, to build an online dashboard for ministries.

“That’s the front-end portal. It’ll have charts and tables where they can do further analysis,” he said.

It is procuring a separate tool that will allow the ministries to do the visual analysis. The agency is now developing the tool and finalizing exactly what kind of data it will need to pull together.

Image by Matthias Rosenkranz, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0