Software package and information systems

Tender description

Civil Service HR (CSHR), part of the cabinet office, is responsible for delivering a HR service to all employees and leaders of the civil service (circa 400 000). As part of this service, CSHR provides online tests and assessments (referred to as online tests) for recruitment across civil service departments. From early 2017 CSHR offered 3 psychometric tests that have been extensively used across government with nearly half a million test instances across 40 departments that use civil service jobs to recruit staff. This prior information notice is to alert the market that CCS, on behalf of CSHR, is looking at establishing a contract with a service provider for the provision of an online test creation, assembly and delivery platform. This platform will allow CSHR to develop and deliver its own online tests. It will be provided in a software-as-a-service model, likely offered as a 2 years + 1 + 1 contract including a form of product evaluation period. Background Demand has continued to grow for these tests, as has the need for other selection tests. The current approach cannot scale to meet CSHR ambition to develop a broader testing suite in-house. The new strategy is to procure a platform for assembling and delivering online tests. These platforms allow test creators to develop tests and deliver them to users. Initially CSHR aims to replace the existing tests: numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning and the civil service judgement test. Beyond this there will be an extensive roadmap to introduce additional tests covering a broad range of attributes, skills and knowledge. The strategic goals for online tests are, in no priority order, as follows: — widen choice and availability of tests for hiring managers to enable more precise assessment of skills, particularly in relation to use of the Success Profiles Framework and professions and functions selection requirements, — strengthen and increase the diversity and quality of the pipeline into jobs to create a more effective civil service that is representative of the UK society that we serve at all levels, — reduced cost to serve through deduplication and greater efficiencies, — improved and more accessible applicant experience, — reduced time to hire through use of automated online tests, — broadened access to tests across the civil service, — more engaging recruitment process reducing loss of prospective candidates. Delivery approach CSHR assembled a multidisciplinary team combining digital and HR professionals to explore how to provide an improved testing service. Digital services in the UK Government must meet the digital service standard. The Government Digital Service (GDS) sets out guidelines on how to meet these in the service manual. This core CSHR team started in the discovery phase through which there was extensive user research and analysis to understand the problem and needs. This generated a clear direction for a test creation and delivery platform enabling CSHR to develop tests to better serve applicant and department needs. In the subsequent alpha phase the team explored how to meet these needs by iteratively developing prototypes. These were tried with a broad spectrum of real users. Prototype versions of the initial tests, and some possible future ones, were created to understand how these tests would be developed and delivered. From this emerged a clear picture of the core capabilities the platform would need to provide to deliver a successful online tests service. Core capabilities When released, the contract notice will offer more detailed explanation of the functional and non-functional needs for the service. The known core needs include: — item authoring, — item development workflow, — test assembly, — test (and item) preview, — computerised adaptive testing (CAT) using Item Response Theory (IRT) approach using existing embedded or existing integrated CAT engine, — linear and branching tests using classical test theory, — test taker management and test scheduling, — user access controls (e.g. role, team), — scalable delivery (adapt to changing usage volumes), — scoring against norms, — reporting functionality, — import and exporting of tests and items, — integrate with applicant tracking systems (initially Oleeo vX), — customisable to adopt consistent GOV.UK UI design for test takers, providing a GOV.UK experience based on the GOV.UK design system, — align with the technology code of practice, — launch test based on parameters provided. (such as which test, level, score norm, item banks to use) These core capabilities will enable us to replicate and modernise the existing test experience but CSHR is also interested in how platforms will enable innovation and significant improvements. The upcoming contract notice will give opportunities to highlight these innovative capabilities.