Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  No, I don't think so. I think all managers are delegated with the responsibility of ensuring that they meet the principles and values associated with the Public Service Employment Act. We have monitoring. We have ways to be able to audit—

Government Operations committee  —and investigate cases where there is alleged nepotism. Certainly that's not acceptable.

Government Operations committee  Yes. We measure and track both. On average, it's a little bit shorter, I think about 10 days shorter, for an internal process. But again, those are advertized processes. If you're hiring from a priority, if you're hiring a former student, if you're hiring through the post-secondary recruitment program that our department offers, it can be much shorter than that.

Government Operations committee  No.

Government Operations committee  Yes. Certainly, if we focus on casual employees, they fall outside the Public Service Employment Act. These are contract arrangements that don't have to meet merit.... But we do track them, and we report them in our annual report. We have noticed that the use of casual workers is on the upswing.

Government Operations committee  On behalf of the whole system we've committed to reducing that. By the way, we've reduced it already from 197 to 193.5, and that's the baseline we're working toward.

Government Operations committee  Within its own direct influence the Public Service Commission is trying to do what it can to reduce those days, but the vast majority of it is outside our direct control where we could exercise influence. Right now I believe we're tracking at 181 days in the most recent—

Government Operations committee  In our departmental results framework we talked about reducing it by 10%. That's our first step. Again, can we go beyond that? Absolutely.

Government Operations committee  I think we can easily talk about half that amount of time, notwithstanding again the fact that you can't compare government and private sector hiring. We have to respect certain parameters, and that will always take a little longer.

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  A baseline study was done a few years ago, which did get to the 197 originally. You have things such as advertising. It takes about six days on average. It can be even lower than that. Screening takes 49 days on average. Again, that probably has to do with the amount of attention managers and HR professionals are paying once the results of the applications have come in.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Page won't mind my revealing this, but I did talk about our request for information process for the transformation of our GC jobs recruitment platform that we launched back in the fall. We're happy that LinkedIn was one of the companies that responded to this request for information.

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  I would distinguish between the job board, similar to what LinkedIn provides, versus a full solution related to the recruitment system. The job board can be used right now by departments and agencies. In fact, we encourage it. If it increases the reach of a job advertisement, then that's great.