Senior User Researcher

We are looking for a Senior User Researcherto join the Government People Group (GPG) within the Cabinet Office, to help develop our Civil Service Jobs platform and wider recruitment service. You will help us to transform how the Civil Service recruits so that we hire the right people, into the right roles, at the right time.

Your role: As a Senior User Researcher, you will be an experienced practitioner who is capable of planning and leading user research & user-centred design activities across large and complex projects and services. You will be an expert in problem definition and selecting the appropriate research strategies to tackle issues and understand user needs.

You will help champion a user-centred, evidence-based approach to formulating strategy and vision, both across the user research practice and the teams you are engaged in.

Our team: We are a digital team made of Service, Product and Delivery Managers, Business Analysts, a Service Designer, a Content Designer, an Interaction Designer and a User Researcher, who will all support you in your work. Our project is looking at Recruitment Transformation, to procure and build a new recruitment platform by 2026, which will enhance the recruitment service provision across government.

This is an exciting leadership role for someone who is passionate to work with people and is motivated by successful delivery in a complex environment, and who cares and can exemplify Civil Service values, in a diverse, ethical and positive working culture.

Civil Service Jobs enables the whole of government to recruit people more efficiently, without which the government could not deliver its work: hence our service brings far-reaching benefits for all citizens.

We also enjoy enabling people to find meaningful jobs, and teams to find great colleagues - contributing to a diverse culture that reflects the diversity in the UK.

What you’ll work on:

You will join our cross-functional agile delivery team focusing on transforming Civil Service Jobs, and helping to redesign how the service should be delivered in the future.

Civil Service Jobs is used by over 3 million candidates per month to find and view vacancies across the Civil Service. Each year it handles over 2 million applications and advertises 140,000 posts. The live service is used by 211 organisations to advertise their vacancies and manage their recruitment processes. Currently, Civil Service Jobs is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provision that has been configured and enhanced to meet Civil Service recruitment, digital and security standards.

Along with the live service, we are running a Recruitment Transformation programme, looking at what the future service should look like. We’ve completed our Discovery and Alpha phases, where we did extensive user research and prototype design, to explore our user needs and potential solutions for the biggest areas of improvement.

We’ve decided that our service needs to be procured rather than building our own, so we’ve now moved into the Beta procurement phase, which will result in appointing a new technology platform provider by the summer of 2024, followed by a build and migration phase to be completed by the end of 2026.

The Department:

Government People Group (GPG) is a large business unit of the Cabinet Office with around 610 staff bringing together back office services across government. It supports the Civil Service with high-volume HR and finance processes, aligning with the Government's modernisation agenda. Established in August 2020, it covers Shared Services, Government Recruitment, Civil Service and Royal Mail Pensions, and the Platforms and Services to support these. GPG delivers services for around 480,000 civil servants across government, it supports 1.5m pension scheme members alongside Royal Mail and provides recruitment services for around 70% of all Civil Service recruitment.