In order to ensure organisation success, leaders face challenges in outlining policy, communicating direction, and ensuring their learning and development strategy is aligned to strategic objectives. HR professionals need to underpin this through empowering people with greater responsibility and putting the necessary procedures in place to ensure sensible progression.

A key challenge for HR is to play a leading role in service transformation and modernisation; changing the way public services are delivered. Successful HR professionals will find themselves at the heart of this change, helping their employer anticipate and respond to policy changes, departmental restructures mergers, efficiency reviews and wider economic issues. A future challenge for HR professionals will be to change the way public services are delivered.

Equality and diversity are both key to all public sector employers. Guaranteeing people the same opportunities to progress and attracting a diverse group to an organisation are crucial components to the public sector's success. HR lead on this and need to ensure their equality and diversity policies are robust and unambiguous.

Whilst we focus exclusively on recruiting to the public sector on both a temporary and permanent basis, we source employment for people from both the public and private sectors and sector experience is not a prerequisite to register with us or work for our clients.

Attracting, retaining and deploying appropriate talent has often been the public sectors achilles heel, but this is changing. Managing a successful human capital strategy is becoming increasingly important as they continue to recruit a broad range of well qualified individuals and then attempt to keep them challenged and motivated.

Public sector employers are open and establish various employee forums to air employees positive and negative feedback. This candid approach is appropriate but the HR function needs to ensure their approach is versatile and flexible to react to the feedback they receive.