In the fall of 2018, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (the Committee) initiated a study of the federal public service hiring process. The Committee held three meetings, received one brief, and heard 16 witnesses over the course of its study.

This report provides information on the composition of the public service, including its diversity. It explains the policy regime under which managers and human resources specialists hire employees, as well as the existing recourse mechanisms for staffing complaints. Finally, it discusses some of the challenges of the federal public service hiring process and offers recommendations on how it could be improved.

The Committee identified four main challenges with the federal public service hiring process:

• managers do not use recruitment programs for students and graduates effectively;
• pools of qualified candidates are not always used to their full potential;
• public service positions are often not advertised externally and are, therefore, often limited to existing public service employees, which limits the federal government’s ability to attract new talent; and
• hiring processes are often extremely lengthy.

The Committee makes seven recommendations in the report. Four of the recommendations address the above-mentioned challenges by proposing:

• the development of initiatives to recruit recent graduates, and the promotion and advertisement of recruitment programs for students and graduates to public service managers and the public (Recommendation 2);
• the creation of a database of qualified candidates that is available to all departments and agencies for as long as is necessary (Recommendation 5);
• the improvement of screening and hiring tools and the advertisement of all positions externally, while respecting the requirements of collective agreements, as appropriate, so that the entire Canadian public can apply (Recommendation 6); and
• the identification of opportunities to reduce the length of the public service hiring process by at least 50%, and the collection and public dissemination of data in the Public Service Commission’s annual report on the average number of days it takes to complete each hiring step (Recommendation 7).