CSPS Digital Academy/CSPS Digital Accelerator/Team 5 - DFO
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Improving the Onboarding Experience at DFO
Our team
Our team contains members from our Department’s Corporate Services, including developers from the Corporate Solutions team and human resources personnel. We have Edithe Sauvé and Stephanie Hébert-Arseneault from Human Resources administration team, with Martin Dion, Jarett Noade, Justin Angus and Marcio Paulo on the development side.
This combination makes us able to tackle the hiring and staffing process at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans from an administrative and technical side.
Our original problem
The current hiring process is fragmented and complex. Managers must input the same information into six different forms to reach different corporate services to initiate the employee onboarding. Each service has its own form of tracking and processing requests that are independent of each other. Managers must manually track each part of the process and forgetting to follow up on any part in the process can delay the employee start date, which is frustrating for both managers and employees. Thus, the current process is error-prone and time consuming for all parties involved.
This problem is important to solve because hiring and onboarding offer an opportunity for the organization to make a positive impression on the newly hired employee. If the Department of Fisheries and Oceans wants to position itself as an employer of choice and attract and retain talent, streamlining its hiring and onboarding process is a logical first step to take.
Evolution of our problem
We had initially planned to focus solely on standardizing the first steps of the hiring and onboarding process, automating the tracking of manager requests and the delivery of some basic emails in a one-size- fits-all approach.
Over the course of the Accelerator, we interviewed hiring managers and administrative assistants. Thanks to those interviews, we discovered a more comprehensive onboarding process that had been implemented in the Maritimes region. When onboarding a new employee, the Maritimes onboarding team considers the unique situation of the individual, such as whether they are a student or transferring from out of the province, or have disabilities. If needed, the Maritimes onboarding team then provides them with additional resources based on their unique situation. This made us realize that hiring and onboarding should not be one-size-fits-all.
Our prototyped solution
In the long term, our plan is to personalize onboarding for each hiring type across the department, like the Maritimes strategic onboarding team’s current process. In the short term, we decided to focus on streamlining the hiring and onboarding process to make it faster and easier for managers.
This means reducing the number of forms to fill out once a letter of offer is signed from six to only one. When submitted, the form automatically triggers requests to the required corporate services. Through our solution, the manager is also able to track the status of each service request.
This seemed the most logical starting point to improve the experience.
Takeaways
The CSPS Digital Accelerator was very interesting and introduced us to new ways of approaching problem solving, notably through user research. We also got to experiment with agile product development, which was a very helpful process for our team. It was also fun on a personal level to be working on a project that is this ambitious and has implications for improving processes across a variety of sectors at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
