Opening Statement to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts

Post Secondary Recruitment Program of the Federal Public Service
(Chapter 21 - December 2000 Report of the Auditor General)

Mr. Chair, I wish to thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our audit of the Post-Secondary Recruitment program of the federal public service, reported in Chapter 21, of our 2000 Report. We will also briefly discuss the role of the Public Service Commission of Canada as outlined in Chapter 9 on Roles and Responsibilities in Human Resource Management.

I am accompanied today by Maria Barrados, Assistant Auditor General and Kathryn Elliott, Principal, who lead this audit.

The Post Secondary Recruitment program is managed by the Public Service Commission, but other players are involved, including the Treasury Board Secretariat, and departments and agencies. The complexities of the relationships we outlined in Chapter 9 are illustrated in the delivery of the program, which is shown in our audit of the Post-Secondary Recruitment program.

The Public Service Commission is an independent agency reporting to Parliament annually through a designated minister. It has the exclusive authority for appointments to and within the public service and related responsibilities for recourse of such appointments. Its mandate is to ensure a highly competent, non-partisan, professional public service, appointed on the basis of merit and representative of the population it serves. It has other responsibilities for training and employment equity delegated to it.

The Post-Secondary Recruitment program is the government's main recruitment vehicle for a wide variety of entry-level professional positions. Traditionally, the public service has hired its future leaders at the entry level and developed them from within. In 1998-99, the Post Secondary Recruitment program received some 11,500 applications from graduates and referred some 6,400 for further assessment. About 800 received appointments. Those found qualified but not hired were not retained in inventories for consideration in future vacancies.

The public service is facing a significant recruitment challenge. Executives, professionals and managers will be hard hit by the retirement of the aging workforce (baby boomers) in the next five to ten years. The increasing competition for qualified candidates from the private sector and other public sectors, a shrinking labour pool, and the difficulty in retaining certain types of employees compound this situation. Staff shortages are already affecting services to Canadians in areas such as tax administration, financial management, and health and safety programs, as we have recently reported.

A major weakness identified in our audit of the Post Secondary Recruitment program was Human Resource planning and general forecasting for recruitment. The number and type of employees needed for the present and future is not well identified for the public service as a whole by the Treasury Board or for individual departments. We note that an exception was found with Statistics Canada, which did have strong forecasting capacity.

Without a clear picture of needs, it is difficult to establish a recruitment strategy and appropriate targets for programs under the large umbrella of the Post-Secondary Recruitment program. Recruitment planning was reactive and ad hoc, responding to the immediate situation. Because of the lack of overall targets and unclear responsibilities for recruitment, we are concerned about the government's ability to address the recruitment priority.

We identified problems with the management of the Program itself. As seen by the recommendations in the Chapter, these can be fixed without legislative changes. These include:

• becoming a more aggressive recruiter by improving candidates' perceptions about the government as a valued career choice to reach the best candidates;
• increasing the program's use by departments, and co-ordinating on-campus recruitment visits with departments;
• improving opportunities for recruitment for positions in the regions;
• maintaining inventories of pre-screened candidates for referrals to other vacancies that arise;
• improving the flexibility and timeliness of the program; and
• assessing the results of campaigns and using these results to improve recruitment efforts.

We have, in Chapter 9 and in this chapter, expressed concerns about reporting by the Public Service Commission to Parliament on the health of the merit system. We expect to see improved reporting on the results of all programs, including the Post-Secondary Recruitment program and an assessment of the ability of the public service to respond to challenges.

The Post-Secondary Recruitment program is a merit-based recruitment program, advertised across the country, which recruits qualified people for the public service. We believe its use needs to be significantly increased and its management improved to address, in part, the large expected number of people leaving the public service.

Mr. Chairman, we would be happy to answer the Committee's questions.