Talent Cloud Results Report

The Idea

Talent Cloud was able to dramatically reduce time to staff and optimize the hiring fit between applicants and teams. But even at this speed, with these results, our team has a nagging suspicion that the future of talent recruitment and mobility won’t be driven by staffing processes. It will come down to a massive interoperable repository of talent, where managers and applicants are continually validating and updating skills, and the ecosystem as a whole functions a lot more like a digital network - a learning system - than a collection of individual processes.

What if there was a system that could answer questions for GC hiring managers like:

• Where can I find someone who can take on a CS-02 cloud architecture role, and is bilingual, resilient, collaborative, and in a pre-qualified pool ready to hire?
• Our department has a critical shortage of user experience designers. How many of our employees have ¾ of the skills required for this role, and could be upskilled to address this unmet need?
• When I search the database, there are no employees looking for work with a profile of skills that meets my needs. Where do I find external talent to fill this hiring need?

In Talent Cloud’s experience, these are the types of questions hiring managers have. And these are the types of questions that a digitally enabled public service should be able to answer, rapidly and with a high degree of data confidence.

At the moment, the Government of Canada does have pools of pre-assessed talent ready for hire without further competition, and a few departments have basic skills inventories for their employees. But this information is fractured, and the ecosystem is a long way from the type of interdepartmental, interoperable talent inventory that would be required to easily respond to the questions identified above.

Under the current model, access to pools is often restricted by departments, and the lists of available pools are not centrally searchable by managers without the aid of HR advisors. There is no way for managers to find talent by individual skill(s). If a hiring manager wants to pull talent from a pool, their needs must meet the original essential requirements for the position posted by the original manager. The essential criteria are not attached to the applicant; it is the applicants who are attached to the list of essential criteria. In effect, the “pools” system is an analogue operating model in both process design and technological functionality, and one that fails to meet the needs and timelines required for a digitally enabled government.

But what if there was a way to link all these pools together, and give GC hiring managers searchable access through a secure, validated portal? What if applicants who were qualified in processes had each individual criteria or skill validated separately, through a portable credential, allowing managers to “mix and match” skill requirements optimized for their individual needs?

What if applicants could then go into their profiles and fill out other information, like their availability, interests, additional skills and timeline of skills development? What if they could proactively get trusted, validated micro-references for these skills from past and current managers?

That’s what we’re talking about when we propose a massive interoperable talent repository - an interconnected marketplace platform, powered by portable credentials, that facilitates rapid matching between managers and talent.

Intended Outcomes

Intended outcomes from this would be:

• Benefits to Canadians emerging from the Government of Canada having a faster, stronger talent engine, capable of reducing staffing vacancies that slow and reduce services;
• A reduction in the time needed for managers to identify high-performing talent to fill vacancies;
• An improved, more tailored approach to identifying talent needs based on a flexible, responsive skills search model, capable of delivering a more optimized result;
• Richer skills data sets for departments on employee skills capacity and external talent sources, for more refined planning and forecasting; and
• Future potential to adapt the skills repository to be an upskilling engine for employees and external talent, with skills mapping on learning pathways, enabling both self-directed improvement and departmentally-driven planning for employee development.

Leveraging Talent Cloud

The most important prerequisite for a talent repository like this is a robust system of portable verifiable credentials and a skills framework optimized for the Government of Canada - work that Talent Cloud has already begun. This system will need to capture the skills that thousands of Canadians have demonstrated through on-the-job work, written tests, interviews or other assessments. And this work, or these assessments, could have been performed anywhere in over a hundred of different departments and agencies in the Government of Canada. On top of that we want Canadians to be in charge of their own data and we want to leave the door open to expanding the use of this system of credential recognition to provincial governments or even not-for-profit organizations and the private sector, allowing for true interoperability in skills recognition. It’s a massive technological challenge, but one that portable verifiable credentials are well designed to handle.

"Digital futures need digital solutions."

The platform features for running external recruitment that Talent Cloud has already built would be key to ensuring a steady stream of new entrants for the talent repository. Some relatively simple changes (already identified by our team) would be required to allow for broader recruitment initiatives in addition to the targeted hiring that Talent Cloud has focused on so far.

Making the massive talent repository searchable will also require tools that our team is already developing. This includes search functionality so managers can enter the skills they want to hire for, as well as other criteria such as location, job classification, and language ability. It will also require improved profiles for users, so they can better highlight their skills and preferences.

The majority of these features are already under development with Talent Cloud, and could be easily scaled up with the right resources.