Digital Recruitment Platform
1. PURPOSE
Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) requires a secure and bilingual digital recruitment platform to provide a seamless and intuitive experience for candidates, human resources (HR), and hiring managers. The goal is to reduce the time-to-hire, customize recruitment strategies, and improve the overall candidate experience.
2. BACKGROUND INFORMATION
As at October 2022, ISC’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch (FNIHB) has a workforce comprised of approximately 850 nurses in a variety of roles, across six regions (AB, SK, MB, ON, QC and ATL) within Canada, licensed under nine different provincial/ territorial nursing regulatory bodies. A subset of this workforce, approximately 500 nurses (primarily registered nurses – RNs and nurse practitioners – NPs) represent ISC’s frontline nursing workforce who primarily work in remote/ isolated First Nations communities. A majority, approximately 84% of employees are part-time (approximately 21% of which work on a temporary basis – as defined by a fixed period of employment).
The inability to attract the right candidates that meet job requirements is a symptom of a reactive hiring system. In hiring nurses, formal government systems, processes, and directives can restrict what ISC can do. By nature, these procedures affect the efficiency and simplicity of basic staffing activities such as hiring, onboarding, and compensation. Ultimately, the number of systems and processes can lead to a lack of responsiveness that is not typical in the nursing labour market. This lack of responsiveness is a threat to talent attraction and retention.
High employee turnover, quantified by the short average length of association of ISC nurses not only indicates retention challenges, but also highlights significant workforce instability. This instability has resulted in an overdependence on contract resources to deliver essential services.
In response to chronic recruitment and retention challenges, ISC has developed a Nursing Health Human Resources (NHHR) Framework, which encompasses a comprehensive alignment of the department’s efforts.
A cornerstone of the NHHR Framework is talent acquisition and management. Accordingly, is the ISC Nursing Talent Management Strategy. It presents foundational evidence and recommendations that support the department’s adoption of talent acquisition and management as the primary method of growing and developing the nursing workforce. Moreover, it will help achieve its goal of creating a strong and stable health human resource workforce in alignment with the department’s strategic objective of self-determination and transfer.
Of note, this procurement supports recommendations number 1 and 2 within the ISC Nursing Talent Management Strategy, which includes:
1. the implementation of a candidate sourcing strategy informed by candidate personas, employee value propositions and around employer branding; and,
2. aligning the candidate experience with industry best practices through the adoption of ISC’s health human resources and support services with a phased approach leveraging the use of a digital recruitment platform.
3. OBJECTIVE
ISC requires a bilingual, end-to-end, applicant tracking system that has multiple additional capabilities, including services to facilitate asynchronous video interviewing, live video interviewing, reference checking, skills tests, video proctoring, among other tasks to be performed during the recruitment process. The recruitment software solution should be able to manage a high volume of applicants for advertised vacancies in various locations across the country, and be free to access for applicants.
Other objectives of this procurement are to strategically:
- Reduce the timelines associated with the hiring of nurses, health human resources, and their support services.
- Improve the candidate experience throughout the application process.
- Reduce the administrative burden on nurse managers.
- Establish and maintain a reliable, nationally implemented, applicant tracking system for the recruitment of human resources and their support services.
- Provide tracking and progress reports to align with the Talent Management Strategy.
- To apply a modern innovative approach to the sourcing (recruitment) of ISC nursing workforce, with the goal of reducing reliance on agency resources.
- To grow the frontline nursing workforce in remote and isolated communities, where ISC has its largest front line public servant footprint.
