Succession Select

Accelerating government recruitment for senior digital roles through candidate matching

  • Publicly sourced

The challenge

Traditional manual searches for identifying suitable candidates from existing senior civil servants for Senior Civil Service digital role vacancies can take up to 4 hours using keyword searches, with the process often suffering from low application numbers and requiring talent teams to proactively identify potential candidates from within the existing government workforce.

The solution

Succession Select is an AI-powered search tool that helps government recruiters find the right people for senior digital jobs. The system works by creating detailed job descriptions, then comparing them against anonymised profiles of current senior civil servants to find the best matches. It draws information from multiple government databases and LinkedIn, whilst protecting people's privacy through data anonymisation. The AI provides ranked suggestions with explanations to help human recruiters make informed decisions, and includes safeguards to prevent bias in the selection process.

The results

The tool is currently being tested by GDS's talent team for senior digital roles and has dramatically cut the time needed to find suitable candidates from 4 hours down to just 1-2 minutes. There is potential for cross-government expansion pending results of ongoing tests.

Details

Organisation name
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) / Government Digital Service (GDS)
Government body
UK Government
User group
Civil servants
Use case type
Reusable
Type of technology
Generative AI
Phase
Beta
Impact
Time savings

Links

Get in touch

Email ai-knowledge-hub@dsit.gov.uk to:

  • find out how to use or collaborate on this tool
  • review content for this tool
  • talk to us about your own tool

Content created: 15 September 2025 | Last updated: 17 September 2025