Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 03

12 / Canadian Government Executive // May/June 2018 Q: Let’s talk longer-term now. Position yourself five or ten years out and you’re looking back at your time as the President of the Public Service Commission of Canada. What would you like to have achieved in that time? This is a seven-year term, which gives me the luxury of being able to plan ahead, to experiment, to try to make adjustments. If something works, then let’s see if we can replicate it more broadly. If it doesn’t work, how can we adjust and do things a little bit differently? Having that long- term mandate is quite a gift. Clearly we have been talking about the renewal of the Public Service for a number of years. We talk about people who are go- ing to walk out the door with huge corpo- rate memory and experience and the fact that the next generation of public servants is not necessarily completely ready to take over that leadership role. I think that is an important legacy to realize over the next five plus years. Can we change the way we recruit and staff in the public service to focus on preparing for that transition, preparing the next generation of public servants to achieve the same kinds of great levels of excellence that we have over the last gen- erations? We haven’t been hiring sufficiently. I talked about millennials earlier. There is a gap, and we have some catching up to do. Our role here is to make sure our sys- tems and our recruitment platforms are working in such a way that managers will choose to use them, and will hopefully and increasingly look outside of the Public Service when it comes to filling vacancies. Unfortunately, the data shows that about 68 per cent of our staffing is done internal- ly. That creates a lot of churn and is also a barrier to improving diversity. Other countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the UK have either gone or are going towards a system where all positions are advertised externally. We could probably benefit from having more external staff- ing as part of renewal. I think to a certain extent, we have some mindsets to change amongst our hiring managers. Our hiring managers are some- times too risk averse, preferring the safety and expediency of internal candidates rather than looking outside of the public service, whether at entry level or mid- level, mid-career level. If you look at our organizations, we suffer from inverted pyramids, where we don’t have a lot of en- try level positions to bring in new talent. The other thing I’d like to see is getting away from a fairly regimented, strict ap- proach to hiring with purely artificial pro- cesses, such as interviews where every- body’s taking copious notes and having to check all the boxes for all the criteria that has to be assessed. Perhaps spend a bit more time talking or assessing someone’s potential for growth. I think if we could hire for potential, we would probably do much better, and we’d probably have a better experience between the candidates and hiring managers as well. I’m also concerned about the balance between our staffing in the National Capi- tal Region versus our regions. We’ve seen a concentration over the last couple of years of public service jobs in the NCR. I think that’s not a great direction for the country. We need to balance that out a lit- tle. There’s a lot of great talent across the country, and we’re not tapping into that talent sufficiently. Those are some of the challenges. I hope we can make good progress over the next six years. Oh, the other thing I should mention is I think that some of our hiring practices are just not sustain- able. We’re underutilizing our programs such as Post-Secondary Recruitment and we are, unfortunately, too often hiring highly qualified graduates into positions for which they are over-qualified and under-challenged. I don’t think that’s the best use of their talent. If I had not been challenged when I came in as a student, I would have said, “Yeah, okay. This’ll pay my bills for the next year but I’m out of here. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” So we do have to change some of those behaviours. Q: Lots of challenges there, indeed. Let’s drill down a little bit here on some of those areas of focus for the Human Resources Management system now. And perhaps focus on imperatives such as diversity, inclusiveness, and the need for the public service to be a part of the action associated with reconciliation with Canada’s In- digenous people. What role do you think the Public Service Commis- sion can play in that? We have a strong role to play in diversity. As you may know, we share responsibility for the Employment Equity Act with the Treasury Board Secretariat, and I believe we have to go beyond the Employment Eq- uity Act and the four Employment Equity groups. I think even if women are overrepre- sented in the Public Service, we must do a much better job of attracting women into careers that are related to STEM. I’ll give you an example. We ran our Post- Secondary Recruitment campaign this year for computer science positions and, as you know, that’s an important part of the public service, an area that’s growing right now. Unfortunately less than 30 per cent of the applicants were women. How do we get more women applying to those jobs? I know some of that is downstream working with universities, working even before university to keep women involved in math and sciences, and I know there are some interesting initiatives that have been done by some departments to try to tackle that. In terms of persons with disability, I think we are above labour market repre- sentation when it comes to their represen- tation. About 5.6 per cent of our employ- We have a strong role to play in diversity. As you may know, we share responsibility for the Employment Equity Act with the Treasury Board Secretariat, and I believe we have to go beyond the Employment Equity Act and the four Employment Equity groups. INTERVIEW