First of all, on the reasons that we've seen a decrease in the hiring of youth or the entrance of youth, recruiting youth is not actually difficult. They are applying for the jobs or to the processes that we have for student hires. Attracting youth is not what is difficult. What is difficult, especially in the past two years because of budget reviews and stuff like that, is that the hiring level has gone down and a lot of departments favoured hiring people with more experience.
We've now entered into discussion with the system as a whole and gone back to the importance of recruiting young professionals for the public service, because representation of all factions of Canadians is important within the public service. We have been doing a lot of work. The most important work is internally, in convincing departments that they need to hire these young potential public servants.
We can attract over 12,000 young people to apply for jobs; we can qualify 6,000 of them. The problem is that only 112 are offered positions, so we are changing the approach and how we're thinking. We continue to work with our partners within the system to see what the issue is and why we are not hiring youth. As I said, part of it is because of some of the cuts in the past, but the system is picking up slowly.
Gerry has been responsible for putting forward some of the recruitment strategy, so I'll let him add to this.