Talent Portals for Equity Seeking Groups
Ethical Services
Because of the restrictions related to privacy and Talent Cloud’s cloud server environment, we were never able to launch the Indigenous Talent Portal, which was developed in collaboration with Indigenous employees and users. (See Section 1 for more information on Talent Cloud’s efforts to secure a Protected B cloud environment.)
During development, Talent Cloud was also approached by other departments and mandate authorities in the Government of Canada who were interested in whether or not similar platforms could be developed for Talent with Alternative Accessibility Requirements and Women in STEM. They were looking for portals optimized to advance employment opportunities for these groups, and could be used for external recruitment, internal mobility and promotional opportunities.
The team feels that based on the groundwork already in place on the platform, this would be easily achievable with the right resources, and could be implemented in under a year if the existing Talent Cloud platform and team was leveraged to deliver these portals. Additional portals for other underrepresented and equity-seeking groups could also be considered.
The structural intended outcome would be to create a technology solution that facilitated the successful increase in the recruitment, mobility and promotion of underrepresented and equity-seeking groups, with the net result being a decrease in the underrepresentation of these groups in the Government of Canada and, eventually, representational equality in employment.
The experiential intended outcome would be to provide an ecosystem where talent from equity-seeking groups experienced an optimal recruitment and mobility experience - one that helped each person find a strong employment fit with a user experience that was validating and emotionally positive. Outcomes would be measured in terms of the ratio of successful hires relative to the opportunities posted by departments, as well as qualitatively.
The development plan would be to produce these portals as part of the same platform ecosystem, ensuring that all talent groups have access to jobs that are advertised more generally (e.g. on the main Talent Cloud platform), as well as those that targeted opportunities for specific communities to which the users belong. One of the benefits of this approach is that it would increase the data available to the Government of Canada on emerging trends and points of potential intervention - such as how many women have 3 of 4 skills needed for a promotion in a STEM role or what percentage of departments have posted opportunities targeting the recruitment of people with accessibility considerations. The intention would be to collect and share this data in a way that respects privacy and a user’s right to their own data.
There are many prerequisites for such a system - most of which Talent Cloud already either has in place or would be in a position to establish very quickly, with the right resources.
These prerequisites include (but are not limited to) technological considerations, IT security, privacy permissions, authority to operate, subject matter expertise on the team, agile development capacity, user experience design capacity, and the ability to change things (even big things) on the platform as user needs dictate. Portals designed to serve underrepresented communities must meet the needs of these groups, which are distinct and varied. These portals must also be designed to address systemic discrimination that can occur during the staffing process if they are to achieve the structural and experiential intended outcomes of the project.
Such portals almost certainly cannot be easily “tacked on” to existing infrastructure and designs, unless the infrastructure and designs have already been structured to be iterative and continuously improved.
Because the Indigenous Talent Portal is fully designed and waiting on final development and approval, it would be straightforward to launch this on the Talent Cloud platform if resources to sustain the initiative were in place.
While much of the coding to support additional portals is already available through Talent Cloud, if new portals were to be developed for other equity-seeking groups (e.g. Women in STEM, Talent with Alternative Accessibility Requirements), Talent Cloud would need to hire additional employees with affiliations to each group, and to engage in a rigorous user experience design process.
Each portal would require ongoing resource support. Additional portals could be scoped, as needed.
