How Digital Transformation to E-Government Will Change Hiring Process

No doubts that many countries of the world are working on digital transformation, building a so-called e-government. This means that governments try to offer more effective and accessible public services to citizens by means of ICT — Information and communication technologies. Previously we wrote that the first try to create an e-government as a system for state economy management took place in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-70s and wasn’t successful. Nowadays, almost all countries realize the necessity to transform to e-government.

In today’s article, we are going to talk about a “routine” process that is carried out using paper documents and how it will look like when it becomes digital.

We have chosen the recruitment process for this article. By the way, we are planning to write and publish a series of articles on a similar topic, so stay tuned to know how our analysts see digital medicine service, the digital award of pensions, and so on.

How the Hiring Process Looks Now

Today, a person who wants to find a job registers on a special job portal or uses social networks to find vacancies. Then, the searcher selects vacancies offered by their algorithms or looks for vacancies manually. A candidate shortlists vacancies and applies for them. After an online or offline job interview, a person gets a job offer. If he/she accepts it, an employee brings a paper diploma, passport, work record book, social insurance card, etc. Actually, the biggest problem here is that an employee leaves a work record book, and the employer has to keep it according to several administrative procedures. Here in Belarus, for instance, employers have to register 3 additional official documents connected with keeping employees’ work record books. Violation of these rules leads to heavy fines.

So, simplification of the process, reduction of administrative burden are the main issues that the development of e-government systems should address.

The Digital Hiring Process Within E-Government

We would like to mention that we describe the processes basing on the knowledge of how this process is organized here in Belarus and CIS countries. And the description of its digital reflection we promote represents an ideal image of how it should be.

Note: we describe the digital processes like there is already a single state-level information system, that is comprehensive e-government is already created.

An individual performs ALL the operations in this system, be it ordering food online, booking a visit to the doctor, or registration of the purchase of an apartment. If we managed to arouse your interest, please read more about our ideas of creating such a system(s).

So, any employment starts with an intention of a person to look for a job. To initiate the process of looking for a new job, a person opens a website or mobile application of the e-gov system, logins and simply changes their labor status in the profile to “Unemployed — Looking for a job”. We proceed from the fact that the status “Unemployed” has been placed by the e-government system automatically right after the latest employer confirmed this person had finished the job.

No doubt that today there is a vast number of job portals and a professional social network where people can find vacancies and apply for them. The disadvantage here is that government authorities have no relevant information about the unemployed. Existence of a “Busyness” module in the state information e-government system could address the problem, providing the government authorities with comprehensive information about the unemployed, their education, skills, expertise, experience, cause of dismissal, new job search history, vacancies available, vacancies a person matches and doesn’t match. Making this aspect of life digital will help the government get this data and make effective decisions. The absence of this data is one more reason to create a comprehensive e-government information system because current job search software solutions are unable to provide it.

So, after a person sets the status, the system analyses his/her skills, experience and matches with the vacancies available. In addition, the system notifies potential employers about the availability of a candidate. And surely, the data is logged for further analysis by state authorities responsible for the labor market — like the ministry of employment and labor.

A further common process of selecting vacancies takes place — a person browses open positions, shortlists and applies for them. Then, online or offline job interviews take place. The data about job interviews conducted, their results are also logged in the e-government system.

When a job talk is successful, an employer registers a digital job offer. A person can approve or decline it. When a digital job offer is approved, a person simply starts working on the agreed date.

Nothing else is required from a person or employer, the e-gov system does everything itself.

Now let’s understand what the system does that the person does not need to. And the actions are pretty simple. Due to the fact that there is an official request — a digital job offer from an organization and its approval from the person, the e-gov system initiates “NewEmployee” software algorithm. After a candidate accepted a digital job offer, the system has:

1. Registered a person as an employee.
2. Added a new record to a person’s work experience.
3. Changed the labor status from “Unemployed — Looking for a job” to “Employed”.
4. Added this person to the list of an organization’s employees.
5. Sent information to relevant state authorities, be it, ministry of labor and employment, the ministry for taxes and charges, social protection services, local executive committee, etc.
6. Sent a request to a bank to open a bank account and register a salary debit card.
7. Processed all the information connected to this given job search and stored anonymously for further statistics or taking labor policy decisions of the state.
8. Notified the organization and the employee, that he/she just became, about successful registration of labor relations.
9. Updated the rest relevant aggregated statistics lists in the system, such as:

• Number of employed this day/week/month/year,
• Number of employed in IndustryName,
• Number of employed in the CountryName/CityName/ProvinceName,
• Number of employed within X period from the beginning of the job search.
• Total number of unemployed in the CountryName/CityName/ProvinceName
• Number of unemployed IndustryName specialists and other relevant lists.

Everything this is possible because:

1. The e-gov system already has all the information about the candidate.
2. The e-gov system already has all the information about the employer.

As a result, due to the fact the hiring process is digital and is carried out within a single state e-government system, new labor relations were registered in a second. All the relevant authorities were notified, records were made in their modules of the E-gov system automatically.

The existence of a single, trusted, accessible e-government information system opens great opportunities for business entities, government authorities and citizens. The main benefit here is not only the digitization of G2C, G2B, G2G interaction processes, but the possibility for government authorities to collect, process and analyze big data caused by all the operations, actions of citizens in order to make administrative decisions as effectively as possible.

Surely, we realize that the development of such a complex software system is accompanied by multiple risks, especially taking into account extremely high-security requirements. However, we are sure that the development and usage of e-government information systems for any routine operations is inevitable in the future.