HMRC is building a modern, digital tax administration and runs the biggest digital operation in Government, providing digital services for 45 million individuals and 4.9 million business customers. We’re one of the country’s largest employers, with around 65,000 people working across the UK.

We are bringing service design to the employee experience in Human Resources so it’s an exciting time to join our newly formed team. You will be part of a team using your design skills to improve the employee journey and enable us to achieve our strategic ambition of making HMRC a ‘Great Place to Work’.

Through the vision of a 5-year HR process and tech roadmap, we have ambitious plans to transform HR services with simpler processes and intuitive digital systems. This will enable colleagues in HMRC to have a straightforward and effortless experience when managing their working lives.

These posts are full time however applicants who wish to work alternative working patterns are welcome to apply. The preferred working pattern may or may not be available, agreement will be subject to business need, and any request to work an alternative working pattern should be made prior to your acceptance of the provisional offer.

This is a role rich in opportunity and challenge for a service designer who is passionate about improving the employee experience in HMRC and how we deliver HR as a service. You’ll join the team at a time of considerable transformational change.

As an experienced Service Designer with proven track record in this role, you will be confident and competent in designing services based on user needs and organisational outcomes. We are looking for someone to join a multi-disciplined team. Your role will include:

• developing a view of the future opportunities and possibilities for employee experience and HR services to meet user needs
• providing design expertise to deliver services that provide an integrated and consistent experience
• building collaboration to solve whole problems for users, regardless of departmental boundaries
• analysing failure within existing services, identifying root causes and creating recommendations to address them, particularly through policy approaches
• identifying future service propositions that solve problems for our users and government, and can drive innovation
• helping to plan user research and collaboratively analysing and synthesising the results of user research
• mapping current service journeys and creating blueprints for improved or new services
• understanding the existing support system for a service - both digital and process based - and designing targeted improvements to existing services or to accommodate new services
• mentoring and coaching within the design community
• participating in HMRC’s design profession and cross-government design and policy communities

Responsibilities Who are we looking for?

We are using the Civil Service Success Profiles in our recruitment. This means for each role we advertise we consider what you will need to demonstrate in order to be successful. For this role, we will be using Experience, Technical (skills) and Behaviours.

Essential experience and technical skills for this role are:
• experience designing services that are delivered through integrated digital products or non-digital services – you’ll need to include links to service design portfolio/examples in your personal statement as evidence
• experience planning and running workshops with stakeholders, end users or front-line service providers
• a solid understanding of user research practice, experience in using analytics and customer insight to define/refine services and the ability to work collaboratively with user researchers to interpret research findings
• significant experience analysing and communicating user journeys and service flows
• experience prototyping and iterating products or services
• an understanding of new and emerging technologies and a basic understanding of digital delivery platforms and prototyping approaches
• experience working collaboratively and effectively with multidisciplinary teams at pace
• experience contributing to service design project planning

These areas of experience are desirable:
• working with the Service Manual or GOV.UK standards and working practices
• designing within a policy context
• designing services which improve the employee experience


The following behaviours are essential:
• seeing the big picture: understanding the wider context of projects and how the work fits into strategic goals
• communicating and influencing: particularly the ability to clearly and persuasively communicate the benefits of user-centred design, design concepts and the evidence underpinning decisions

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Communicating and Influencing

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• User-centred analysis
• Ideation and innovation
• Understanding constraints