Thank you, Madam Chair. The regional recruitment was something that the people from the departments have been talking about at the open houses. We’ve had one open house; we’re expanding to open houses in all the regional centres where we have service offices. We’re going to have two days of open house here to cover the city of Yellowknife and because regional recruitment is the intent of that, the strategy is to fill the regional positions, positions out there in the regions that could be also in the communities. It was not discussed in Ottawa. The career fair in Ottawa was not specifically to look at individuals that may not have all of the qualifications necessary to do a job. We weren’t looking for people down there that would be coming up here using 80 percent of their salary for the pay and 20 percent of their salary for training. So that wasn’t discussed at that Ottawa career fair.

Job descriptions are written by the various departments. The employing departments write the job descriptions, and all job descriptions are evaluated in the same fashion. They’re evaluated through the Hay system, then, based on that, the points and the qualifications that the departments think are needed for that to effectively perform 100 percent of those job functions are put in there and evaluated as such.

As far as experience goes, that is a bit of a dilemma where you have young people graduating from university and so on that don’t have experience and some of them call for experience in these job descriptions. So, many times we put programs in place to provide experience to students, such as the Internship Program, the Summer Student Program and now we’re looking at the Student and Youth Strategy. That’s all designed to attract students and youth into the public service.

The vacancy rates are something that we are going to put in writing to committee. The comment of positions being left deliberately vacant is not a situation where the government comes to the Assembly and asks for positions in the mains or through the business planning process and then immediately keeps the positions vacant. Often what happens is, as a management tool for budgeting, there will be vacant positions, as we know, throughout the system and a deliberate attempt is made to manage the human resources by each of the departments in order to make sure that they are not over-expending their budgets in any area.

I’m going to let the deputy minister speak on the PeopleSoft. The record of employment is something that has come to my attention. As I have information, last fiscal year we had just slightly over 600 individuals leaving the public service, GNWT public service and for each of those there’s a requirement to get their record of employment out to each of those staff members in the appropriate time. I guess I could also provide an additional number that up until 2014, I guess that would be the fiscal year ‘13-14, we’ve had 457 people leaving the government. So in situations where individuals need a record of employment to move on to other types of things where we are trying to meet the requirements on providing the record of employment to individuals, sometimes we understand it’s being extended a lot longer than it should be, but for the most part one of our objectives here recently, and I guess always has been, is to try to get their record of employment to the individuals that have left the public service as quickly as we can within the legislation that indicates to us how long and we have to provide that information.

As far as direct appointments and what we do for direct appointments often used as a development tool for different departments, various departments that present a direct appointment to Cabinet. Their direct appointment is used that otherwise would not really achieve any other result. There is no other positive results that could be gained by putting the job out for public advertising that we have a candidate within the system or just that wants to come into the system that is looking for a job that a direct appointment would be the best and most efficient way to bring the person into the public service. We know that we had 216 direct appointments in the first two years of this government. Of that, 193 of those positions were priority candidates, either priority 2 or priority 1 candidates, and if we have just a priority 1 candidate, 119 of the 216 direct appointments were priority 1 candidates.

I think we did talk a bit about the safe disclosure, but in case I’ve missed anything, especially the area of PeopleSoft as a tool for human resources, I’ll ask the deputy to provide some of that detail.