Evidence of meeting #143 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was job.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Public Service Commission
There are a couple of points there.
First, I think we're too internally focused as a public service, and I talked about this before. I'd like to see a little bit more balance, balance between providing opportunities for existing employees to continue to grow in their careers and bringing in new talent, and I don't think we're there. We have some work to do.
Conservative
President, Public Service Commission
I think it's a cultural shift. It's a matter of making sure that when we are developing our inventories and programs, we're providing some value added so that people will make the choice to go into a post-secondary recruitment inventory rather than start an internal process. It's going to take some time.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I just want to interrupt you. I've got an example here, an excerpt from an exam question from a competition that included external applicants. The candidate applying was told they had failed because they did not accurately answer with regard to the term “business line client”.
Now the term—the HR person admitted—was internal language not available to outside people. The question was, “You're meeting with the business line client who does not understand the role of national communication services.”
Here we have the government purposely setting it up to block outside applicants. What are we doing to stop this practice of discriminating against Canadians, taxpaying Canadians, who have every right to apply for a job, but the government is blocking them?
President, Public Service Commission
Again, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that there's discrimination. I think we are used to our jargon, and we have to be aware, when we set posters like this, that we're being exclusive and that we're not being accessible to all Canadians.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Everyone's doing a great job of having the public service reflect the demographics. This government, the previous government and the government before have done a great job of doing that.
How are we failing on something so basic as this?
President, Public Service Commission
Yes, basically, plain language, having job posters that align with jobs that exist elsewhere in the private sector outside of government.... I talked about the system that we're working on. That will eliminate a lot of this, because we will align the way we describe positions that are made available in ways that people can understand. That's part of the challenge.
I do want to talk about nepotism, though, because that is certainly something that we are on the lookout for at the commission. We will investigate if there are allegations or if there is evidence of nepotism in a selection process, whether people have colluded—
Conservative
Liberal
President, Public Service Commission
I think we also have to distinguish the fact that in some cases, through succession planning and through talent management, managers can identify that when a position becomes vacant, the best person on their team, the person most qualified, is Joe or Sally. Why launch a complex process that is seen as a bit of a sham, if at the end of the day that's the person who, with all of the right justifications, is qualified. That still meets merit. That is not nepotism, to my mind.
Conservative
President, Public Service Commission
Some jurisdictions have done so. I've talked about this openly before. Australia and New Zealand have a policy that 100% of the jobs have to be posted outside for their governments. The U.K. is moving, and by 2020 they'll be at 100% as well. They're currently at—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Do you have the power or authority to effect this proper change?
President, Public Service Commission
No, I don't, but I can certainly implement it. I would be glad to do so.
Again, when I talk about this, people say, “Well, what do you have against existing internal candidates?” When we say it's open to the outside, we don't say it's closed to people inside. It means it's open to everyone.
Inside candidates will continue to have an advantage because they know the system and have worked in the organization, but let's level the playing field a little bit more by giving more opportunities for non-public servants to apply.
Conservative
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Thank you very much.
One of the things I'm curious about is the relationship between the manager who has a staffing need and the HR department or your organization. What's the extent of the involvement by somebody from outside of the immediate work area, where the demands are known and there's the sense of the team, versus somebody who does have professional skills and knowledge about a hire but not necessarily knowledge of the work context, for lack of a better term?
President, Public Service Commission
Well, most of the staffing in government is done through the delegated model by individual hiring managers located in departments and agencies that are exercising delegated authority, delegated from their deputy minister under the conditions that we set. Of course, we do monitoring and surveillance to make sure that those delegations are being exercised properly.
We have more of a central agency role in terms of surveillance of the overall system, but we also intervene because we are the front door—or front window, I guess—when people are coming in from the outside to apply to jobs in the federal government. We can influence that way as well, again, through programs and initiatives such as were described earlier, and through post-secondary recruitment, where we provide a service to the whole of government.
We create inventories, but at the end of the day, we cannot force managers to use the inventories. We can influence. In some cases, through surveillance, we might force some corrections or course corrections with departments, but at the end of the day, it's a very delegated model.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
How long typically can somebody sit in an inventory before being contacted to apply for a job?
President, Public Service Commission
It's a good question. We do establish these inventories, but unfortunately we don't have enough touch points of communication with candidates. We should be having regular feedback. In fact, in some cases, we can set that up without necessarily having individuals make a call. An example would be sending an email to all students to ask them to please update their profile on our student website and to please indicate if they're still interested in student employment.
Little things like that nudge people. It helps, because then the inventory is fresher for managers who make the calls when we refer candidates. If we refer 10 people and they get 10 responses of “I'm not interested,” “I've changed my phone number,” or “I'm working for Google. Thank you, I'm not interested,” that frustrates managers. If, however, they get eight out of 10 who are interested in an interview and potentially in being considered, then that makes for an inventory that people will use a lot more.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
If government did move towards a system under which they were posting 100% or a significant portion of their job asks externally, what kind of an effect do you think that would have for your inventories? Presumably they would see more action.
President, Public Service Commission
That's an excellent question. If that were the case, we would need to make sure that our systems were modern, efficient, and able to deal with the volume. That includes things such as using the most modern assessment tools possible to be able to get the number of candidates down to a number that's manageable for a manager. A manager may say, “I have two positions and I want to interview about 30 people.” If the floodgates open and there are 1,000 applications, we have a responsibility to make sure that the system is refined enough to allow them to bring it down to the candidates who are most promising, including using testing methodology to actually bring it down to a number that's manageable. We recognize that we can't go 100% external without having modern tools.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Do the needs of the public service make it relatively easy to acquire off-the-shelf technology for that kind of parsing down, or is it highly customized technology that you need in order to do that?
President, Public Service Commission
That's the process we're in right now. We have defined the user requirements. I described them in my opening remarks. We know what user needs are out there. We are now going to look at scoping and defining this project.
Our next step would be to go to an RFI to see what exists, wherever it may be, that may be able to meet some but probably not all of our requirements—we know that. After that, we would look at whether we could possibly, again, do more user testing based on what we get back in terms of feedback, again, proceeding iteratively and making sure that every step of the way we're testing it against the needs of the public service.
Of course there are some principles and some needs, such as official languages and accessibility, that are non-negotiable when it comes to implementing any new change, any system, to the platform. The GC Jobs platform that people use right now we see as significantly changing in the future, but we're going to do it iteratively. We're also going to be cautious in order to avoid some of the mistakes of the past in terms of big systems.
