Australia's central welfare agency has been forced to overhaul its hiring selection processes after the government's anti-cronyism watchdog overturned a series of promotions.
Promotion reviews within the public service nearly doubled over the 2021-22 financial year, resulting in the highest number of overturned decisions in years, the Merit Protection Commissioner revealed in its latest annual report.
The promotions umpire said it had reversed the promotions of 12 staff within that period as not being the most meritorious for the role in line with the selection criteria.
Eleven of those decisions involved Services Australia, which in December 2020, had sought to fill a series of APS 5 and 6 roles through a bulk hiring process.
By the following year's end, Services Australia used the merit pool to fill positions, resulting in the promotion of 747 APS employees, the annual report said.
Of those promotions, 115 were reviewed by the merit body and 11 were ultimately overturned.
The Merit Protection Commissioner said it held a number of meetings with Services Australia to discuss its hiring selection process and the agency agreed to make changes in order to ensure "merit is embedded and underpins all recruitment decisions."
"The only reason a PRC can overturn a promotion decision is finding one of the applicants who is part of the review has demonstrated they have more merit than the person who had been promoted," the report said.
"The increased number of overturns indicated that the selection process was not always meeting its key objective, which put simply, was to identify and select the most meritorious candidates for the roles advertised."
Services Australia general manager Hank Jongen said his agency had since implemented a new skills assessment tool and personality questionnaire to address the issue.
"Since this recruitment was undertaken in 2020, we have innovated and refocused our processes," he said.
"We have worked closely with the Merit Protection Commissioner to do this, and to trial and embed modern and best practice techniques, so we can select staff with the skills and attributes we need now and into the future.
"We're committed to continually identifying improvements to our recruitment processes, and to ensure candidate care is central to our approach."
While more than half of inquiries about promotion reviews related to Services Australia, the commissioner's report also found nearly a quarter concerned the Australian Taxation Office, followed by 6 per cent relating to the Home Affairs Department.
The watchdog warned agencies against regarding merit as secondary to efficiency when looking to recruit new staff.
"Agencies are operating in an increasingly tight labour market and are looking to use recruitment processes that are efficient, effective and less resource-intensive," the report said.
"However, like any emerging technology and new ways of doing things, it does bring a degree of risk. A key risk is that the merit principle becomes compromised or secondary to other priorities such as efficiency."
