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Learn how the Talent Acquisition team at His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) helps hiring managers write job postings and generate intelligent recruiting insights across their UK regional offices.
HMRC is a department of the government of the United Kingdom responsible for tax collection and enforcement of financial policies—essentially, the UK equivalent of the IRS in the United States. HMRC has 65,000 employees, and its talent acquisition team hires between 4,000 and 6,000 roles every year.
As part of the UK government's guidelines, departments like HMRC are encouraged to hire outside of London, the capital of England. To meet this mandate efficiently, HMRC needed to better understand the talent pool in every city to attract candidates and build talent pipelines.
Siobhan Stericker, Talent Insights and AI Lead within HMRC, noticed that hiring managers often spent too much time on the recruitment process — especially creating job postings and preparing interview questions.
Stericker realized that HMRC already had all the data needed to create more compelling job postings: historical hiring data, national statistics on compensation, and public research on diversity, equity, and inclusion. To avoid creating more manual work for hiring managers — and to speed up the recruitment process — Stericker knew they would need an automated solution.
Bringing AI to a large public sector organization presents a few unique challenges. As a government department, HMRC must be hyper-conscious of data security and adhere to strict internal guidelines. Additionally, Stericker knew that the department would be skeptical about the quality of AI-generated content.
With these considerations in mind, Stericker’s team chose MindStudio:
“This is a future-proofed platform. With AI technology developing so fast, we have confidence that we don’t have to start from scratch as things change. It’s very reassuring,” Stericker says.
With MindStudio, Stericker's team built two AI workers for talent research and operations.
A talent-sourcing AI worker creates job postings, generates interview questions, and drafts outreach messages that recruiters can use to jumpstart the candidate-sourcing process.
The AI worker ensures that every job posting reflects HMRC’s employer value proposition, so the ad is always on brand. When drafting questions for screening interviews, it automatically factors in research on diversity, equity, and inclusion to help recruiters avoid hiring biases.
A talent insights AI worker that uses open-source data — such as the national census, labor market trends, salary benchmarking guides, and talent reports — to help HMRC to understand the current talent market and make actionable recommendations for attracting candidates.
The AI worker predicts emerging talent trends and identifies current skills gaps, so HMRC can proactively plan for future hiring needs. For example, the tool can identify which office location is near a high density of recent engineering graduates — so HMRC can strategically open engineering roles in that branch. The AI worker tailors recommendations with HMRC's compensation standards, benefits, and employer branding in mind.
“The AI workers are helping our organization to become not only data-driven but insight-led as well," Stericker notes. "It can be difficult for people to understand what the data means and what they should do next. With MindStudio, the talent acquisition team has the actionable insights to make strong strategic choices."
In just a few months of testing and early adoption, hiring managers unanimously agreed that the AI workers are easy to use, help lighten their workload, and allow them to focus on higher-value tasks.
But the outcome isn't just a subjective improvement: the AI workers save hiring managers an average of 81 minutes per job opening. The time potential is significant given the number of roles HMRC hires every year. When the AI workers are rolled out across the entire organization, these time savings add up to nearly 4 years of manual work – over the span of just one calendar year.
Other teams at HMRC are noticing the talent acquisition team’s thought leadership. Now, workforce planners, HR business partners, outreach, and regional transformation teams at HMRC have all started using AI workers to produce comprehensive labor market reports. This process used to take three months to complete now only takes a few weeks, thanks to the AI worker’s ability to source and interpret labor market data.
With AI workers powered by MindStudio, HMRC’s talent acquisition team adopted an innovative approach to talent sourcing, recruiting, and hiring. The talent acquisition teams results are setting new standards for how HMRC and the broader public sector can leverage AI.
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