The Arts Council is the national development agency for the arts. Our role is to make great art accessible to everyone by investing public and national lottery funds in and promoting a wide range of artistic experiences including theatre, music, literature, dance, photography, digital art, carnival and crafts.
A new team
The Arts Council has a clear obligation to keep operating costs to a minimum to ensure that as much of its budget as possible finds its way to supporting the arts. To that end, we identified opportunities to streamline the infrastructure by reviewing our regional structure.
For me, these changes created an opportunity to build an entirely new human resources service team, boosting the level of HR support to our dispersed regions with a more proactive HR partnering service, helping to take the organisation forward.
I decided to seek external help to ensure that the selection processes were robust and that they would promote diversity and equality, two key tenets of our organisation's employment policy.
I selected Orion Partners for its capability in assessment and specialist knowledge and understanding of the HR function and new models of working.
A rigorous process
Orion interviewed key stakeholders before designing the assessment process and agreed with me an outline of the proposed HR roles, the key competences required and the assessment methodology. This resulted in a five-part structure for an assessment day to enable us to build a well-rounded picture of the candidates' competences and included:
• career and technical knowledge interviews with scenario-based questioning
• competence based interviews
• tailor-made meeting simulation exercises using realistic situations from within the organisation
Katy Dent
• written business case scenarios and full psychometric profile feedback sessions using SHL's OPQ32i
It was important that the assessments were carried out by specialist assessors independent of Arts Council staff. This impartiality helped to support the equality of opportunity in the process and when assessing internal candidates who were known to selection panel members.
The assessments were intense and, as Lynda Magee, from Orion says: "the combination of exercises really let us see what candidates could do in practice rather than just what they said they could do in theory. Our focus was on bringing the panel as accurate and comprehensive information as possible that they could rely on as an aid to their final decision-making. I think as time has gone on, the accuracy has been proven through seeing the content of the reports come to life in the individuals in the organisation post-appointment."
The results
In the period since the new organisation went live, our new HR service has transformed the way we work and how we provide services and guidance to managers and staff throughout the Arts Council. A key element in its success is the high calibre of our new recruits.
There is further change underway as the organisation rationalises its staffing structure in line with public sector efficiency savings targets, so the coming year will be a challenging 'stress test' for the new HR Team.
Arts Council England's transformed HR team will face those challenges better equipped now than they ever could have done before.
Katy Dent is HR director at Arts Council England
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