ISLAMABAD, Oct 28: Federal Information Technology Minister Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on Thursday directed officials of his ministry and all its 16 subsidiary departments to start e-hiring from February next year, said an official statement.

"I want the ministry and its attached departments to be role model for other ministries, public sector organizations and corporations in adopting processes of e-hiring and e-procurement in future," he said at a meeting of the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) budget utilization review held on Thursday.

Minister of State for IT Ali Asjad Malhi, Secretary Khalid Saeed, heads of attached departments and other senior officials also attended the meeting.

He said the ministry would follow the process of e-hiring with the process of e-procurement to ensure transparency and save time and public money in such matters.

"Once the e-hiring system is in place, it would help save time and money of applicants to know about possible status of their applications," he said.

Awais said the system of e-hiring would be used only for posts in grade-6 and above given the low level of education and qualification required for the low-grade jobs which could also cause problems for these candidates in filling out the e-forms to be made available on the ministry websites.

He said the process of e-hiring would also do away with the phenomenon of incomplete or wrongly-filled out applications as the electronically processed applications would be computer- guided and easy to fill out because of the online instructions and guidelines made available side by side with different sections of the application.

The minister said the e-hiring system would also facilitate the process of short-listing and selection of the candidates and the candidates would be able to access all information about these processes online.

He said the ministry and its attached departments would develop or outsource software consistent with their requirements to be used for the purpose of e-hiring and later such models could be adopted by similar organizations in the public sector at a later stage.

The meeting also reviewed progress on the ongoing projects of Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) and Pakistan Computer Bureau (PCB). The EGD has already taken in hand 11 projects which are at different stages of execution while the PCB is implementing two major projects, including setting up of IT labs at about 1100 schools of the country.