Seventy-two percent of Government vacancies remain unfilled

Ministerial departments in the UK failed to fill 72 percent of vacancies in 2014/15, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by the leading cloud-based CRM provider, Bullhorn.

Bullhorn requested information on total recruitment spend in the financial year 2014/15 from all 24 government ministerial departments. It also requested information on the number of advertised vacancies in the last financial year, and the percentage filled.

A fall in recruitment spend is a trend witnessed across several ministerial departments, with the Department for Education and the Department for Energy & Climate Change registering a 24 and 13 percent decrease respectively.

The results are as follows:

Recruitment spend in 2014/15 financial year

Department	2011/2012	2012/2013	2013/2014	2014/2015	Percentage Change (from last available data set)
Department for Energy & Climate Change	£222,000	£553,000	£836,000	£724,697	-13.31%
Department for Education	£108,231	£383,291	£317,926	£241,445	-24.06%
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs	Not available	Not available	Not available	£266,102	NA
Department of Health	£198,135	£132,605	£188,326	£172,208	-8.56%
Foreign & Commonwealth Office	Not available	Not available	Not available	£467,939	NA
Northern Ireland Office	Not available	Not available	Not available	£5,919	NA
UK Export Finance	Not available	Not available	Not available	£263,206	NA

Number of positions advertised, number of positions filled and percentage of positions filled in 2014/15 financial year

Departments	Total positions open in 2014/2015	Total positions filled in 2014/2015	Percentage of positions filled
Attorney General's Office	20	16	80%
Department for Communities & Local Government	346	200	58%
Department for Energy & Climate Change	617	Not available	Not available
Department for Education	787	470	60%
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs	58	53	91%
Department for Work & Pensions	7,067	1,518	21%
Department of Health	80	73	91%
Foreign & Commonwealth Office	74 (excluding internships)	3	4%
Northern Ireland Office	18	18	100%
Scotland Office	1	1	100%
UK Export Finance	48	45	94%

Commenting on the results, Bullhorn’s international MD Peter Linas says: “The results show very diverse recruitment patterns across each of the departments. The fact the Foreign & Commonwealth Office has a fill rate of just four percent and the Department for Work & Pensions 21 percent, is really quite shocking.

“There’s certainly room for improvement. According to our UK trends report this year, the top sources of qualified candidates in 2014 were existing candidates from recruitment CRMs and social media. So recruiters serving the public sector really need to make sure they are making the most of the technology available to them to find the most appropriate candidates for these roles.”