There are a lot of elements that play into our ability to attract and retain the skilled professional resources that we need. I think in any given year, normal attrition sees us needing to hire about 100 individuals across the organization. That ebbs and flows. Sometimes it's a little higher than that.
While we hired many during the pandemic, we also received additional funding. The intention was to ramp up and increase our workforce.
I could talk a bit about the profession, and then I would like to talk about the impact the strike had on our organization.
I would say the accounting profession in general—given that a significant amount of our workforce is made up of CPAs and financial auditors—is seeing a decline in people going into accounting and then, more importantly, going into the auditing field of accounting. You can get your CPA now in so many varied ways. That is just a reality that AG offices across the country and accounting firms are facing.
That being said, we also hire so many other, diverse professions. We have lawyers, engineers and economists. There's always an issue on that front.
We struggled a lot in the area of professionals in communications and professionals linked to public service matters, including HR professionals and procurement professionals.
All of our support services were on strike, really, so if we go back to the impact of the strike, we had about 170 people who were out on the picket line. By the time everyone returned, after we had a deal and about a month later, we saw that of those 170, about 35 or so had left the organization for various reasons.
We then saw a sharp increase in sick leave. We were hard hit in our procurement office, HR and communications, for sure. For example, we wanted to have 14 procurement officers in order to support our modernization efforts, but a month after the strike, we were down to three. We have to re-staff all of that. It causes so many delays in our ability to advance projects, and then there is the need to hire. We saw a sharp decline of about two-thirds in our HR capacity, which really ground hiring to a halt.
I think there are many factors that play into the difficulty in properly resourcing an organization.