Off-line digital selection by Livorno Province

By project DSBPGovernance

Published on 11 March 2025

Italy

Toscana

Livorno

About this good practice

During pandemic years 2020-2022, organizing and hosting a public selection of personnel became a heavy burden for the Public Administration, both from a financial and a workload point of view, due to the need of ensuring the safety of participants.
Some private companies, already active in the field of assisting the P.A. with HR selections, proposed the possibility of remote selections online.
In 2023, the Province of Livorno, together with its stakeholders (local municipalities with whom it had entered into an agreement for the joint selection of staff), decided to opt for the remote selections, mainly in order to:
- reduce internal costs and workload
- speed up the selection procedures
- facilitate the participation to the selection by a wider group of candidates, notwithstanding their geographical location
- put the candidates’ digital skills on test from the very first step of the selection.
By the end of 2023, a change in legislation (Presidential Decree no. 82/2023) imposed that PA HR selections must be carried out with digital tools, but offline. Hence, the Province entered into an agreement with the only private company that, at that time, ensured that a remote selection could be done, with the candidate’s pc being offline during the test.
The practice is implemented throughout the following items:
• use of a digital platform by candidates
• examination management by a commission
• test management
• proctoring service
• secretarial activities

Resources needed

Each session involves a fixed cost (€ 2.300,00 + VAT) and variable costs (€ 10/candidate) shared among the Public Entities. Province HR Office’ 3 staff are in charge of the selections; the exam commission is assisted by 1 staff of the service provider who grants also 1 “Proctor” every 8 candidates

Evidence of success

1) Economies of scale and larger number of candidacy applications effectively managed
2) With over 1,000 selection procedures throughout Italy in the last 3 years, no appeals were made against the procedure.
3) Costs savings: compared to an in-person digital selection overall, costs are reduced by 30%
4) Selection time saving
5) Reduced workload for internal staff
6) Facilitated participation of candidates, also containing their travel time and costs.

Potential for learning or transfer

The practice can be replicated without major difficulties, as ICT requirements are rather simple. The legal implications of employing such selection procedure must be considered, taking into consideration the legal framework regarding selection of public administration personnel in each country. The practice is easily transferable, since everything is online with limited logistic implications.
The practice can be applied in every case of staff selection by a public entity, which in turn depends on the funds available to each PA to hire and carry out the HR process. In all cases, though,the practice proves to entail lower comparative costs against more traditional selection methods.