Thank you, Madam Chair. The Workforce Planning Strategy does have several sub-strategies, a Regional Recruitment Strategy being one of them. The Inclusive Recruitment Strategy is another, the Student and Youth Strategy and also the Career Fair Strategy. The area where the Member speaks of where there’s going to be lots of public servants retiring within the next five to 10 years, we have the Knowledge Retention Framework that we’re going to employ to try to retain the knowledge, pass the knowledge on to individuals that would be staying with the GNWT, like perhaps developing some mentorship program guidelines that will allow individuals to work with these potential retirees. That is something that we need to do; it’s something that we consider to be a very important part of individuals that are retiring.
We are also developing a harder to recruit framework and refocusing recruitment strategy, bilingual recruitment strategy as well. The question of the career fair in Ottawa versus the open houses that we’re having in the various regional centres, is the career fair we really are targeting some positions that are very specialized and as a result of some devolution transfers over, so a lot of that was targeted at that. But at the same time, we did engage people from the North that do live down there and may be going away.
Addressing some of the other issues, the Member brought forward with difficulty for Northerners to come back. I have talked a bit about the idea of having more career fairs, actually, near where some of our students are going to university and so on, so that the students are aware that the GNWT is available as a potential employer.
The open houses were specifically targeted at bringing people from the Northwest Territories into the public service, so trying to fill the jobs that are
available in the GNWT and the jobs that can be filled by Northerners.
The numbers on the workers’ compensation, I guess as we go through the business planning process here as we go through the mains, we can deal with the specific numbers.
In as far as exit surveys for public servants that are leaving the GNWT, the GNWT has stopped doing exit surveys. We would continue exit surveys if we thought that we were gaining a lot of value or some value from them, but as it turns out, most of the exit surveys only was an area for individuals to vent their grievances with the GNWT and tell us specifically what their issues were during their employment with GNWT in many of the cases. Other individuals said they were happy and were leaving the GNWT on a positive note and seemed less interested in doing the exit survey, or exit interviews.
The change in the way we advertise jobs was for a specific reason. When we hire a person into the public service, one of the questions we ask is: How did you know about the job, what made you apply for the job, what medium did you use when you were looking for employment? We found that a very, very low percentage, I think 3 percent of individuals that have come to work for the GNWT had got their ad out of the newspaper. Most people got their information on-line.
Recognizing the fact that some communities don’t have real good Internet, most do, but some still don’t, and also that some individuals don’t have computers, what we’ve done is in areas in a community where there will be a job come out, a job advertisement, there is a fax sent to the community governments where that job could be physically posted, and also in communities where we have government service officers working for the Department of Executive, they are advised of the jobs that are going out in the communities that they represent. I think that’s most of it. So with that, thank you, Madam Chair.