TBS and ACFO-ACAF collaborate to improve staffing protocol

General Updates

May 26, 2021

The Office of the Comptroller General has adopted two recommendations on staffing made by ACFO-ACAF in an announcement to CFOs this April.

The Assistant Comptroller General Roger Ermuth made the following recommendations in an email:

Area of Selection: While not all roles can be performed across Canada, many of them can. Given the ongoing work situation due to COVID-19 as well as the opportunity to benefit from diversity existing within regions, a more inclusive approach to area of selection will ensure timely access to qualified individuals. This will also maximize opportunities for regional employees and enhance the overall competitive process.
Recent Experience: While some skills and abilities require timely knowledge of new tools and approaches, others are engrained and no value is lost over time, especially as candidates broaden their experience. Please encourage your teams to apply a more open-ended lens to this criterion and carefully assess the relevancy of the recent experience requirements in postings to ensure that these are not unnecessarily excluding qualified individuals.

These recommendations—included in a staffing position paper by ACFO-ACAF in February 2021—are a welcome change to current staffing practices made across the federal public service. We hope this will lead to the attraction of new talent from across Canada, as well as the development and retention of devoted, qualified public service employees in the future.

The position paper published by ACFO-ACAF included a third recommendation that has yet to be adopted: that the employer reduce the number of non-advertised staffing actions and make the rationale for non-advertised staffing more transparent. ACFO-ACAF and the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer continue to work together on this final recommendation.

We are pleased that the employer has adopted two of our recommendations on the matter of staffing and will continue to advocate for this final recommendation of staffing transparency.