Talent Cloud Results Report

The Digital Standards were officially released by the Office of the Chief Information Officer in 2018. But for those working on government innovation and digital initiatives, they’d long been considered best practices for achieving meaningful results. To get different outcomes, you must adopt different business processes. To get citizen-centric, digital age results, that means embracing the Digital Standards in all aspects of the work.

For the Talent Cloud team, the Digital Standards act as a foundation. But unlike a physical foundation, our ability to work in line with the Digital Standards is dynamic. That means the foundation of our team can actually get stronger if we actively maintain what we’re doing well and challenge ourselves in the areas where we can do better. Here’s just a snapshot of how the Digital Standards have helped to shape the project and its outcomes.

Iterate and improve frequently

Our team uses the Agile method, working in two-week sprints. At the end of each sprint, the teams (back end, policy and design) show their progress and look for feedback. New input from live testing and any changes from emerging priorities are integrated into the forward plan the next day. This creates tight feedback loops that help us stay responsive to user input and maintain momentum as we develop and improve features.

Work in the open by default

Talent Cloud is an open-by-default project, with information posted publicly on our website and under the group “Talent Cloud” on GCcollab.ca. This includes wire frames, prototypes, user stories, and blog posts. The team’s code and workflow are available on the open source site Github.

Use open standards and solutions

Talent Cloud is an open source project and is a pioneer at TBS for using an Open Source software stack (e.g., PHP, Apache, Linux, React, Postgres, Docker, Storybook, Redux, SASS, Formik, Snyk) for hosting sites in a protected environment.

Talent Cloud follows a "Mobile First" approach to design and development to ensure it can be easily used across various platforms. It uses common web standards to enable the greatest interoperability.

Address security and privacy risks

Talent Cloud was one of the first protected applications in the Government of Canada to move into the cloud. To do this we had to pioneer a new approach to privacy that allowed for iterative improvements to the platform.

We’re always in the process of updating our Privacy Impact Assessment (the ultimate government privacy document for applications). As we scope new features that will require collection of new data or handling the same data differently, we are also updating our privacy documentation. Currently we’re working on our third Privacy Impact Assessment, and we intend to keep it evergreen.

Be good data stewards

People are tired of always being asked for the same information. This consistent feedback from users drove our commitment to making reusable skills central to our platform. By breaking up job requirements into individual skills, we allow applicants to only describe those skills once and re-use the same descriptions for future job applications.

But that only scratches the surface of what candidates are asked for during the hiring process. To push this idea further, Talent Cloud is working to pilot the use of verifiable credentials. This work would generate trusted records that replace the need to repeatedly assess the same requirements.

Design ethical services

Designing an ethical staffing platform is the core philosophy of the team. We sum this up as ‘making the good road the easy road’ for our users, and taking the right path to get there as a team, no matter how long or difficult it is in the build phase. This means diving deep into the way policy, product and human nature intersect. It requires working through the complexities of bias reduction, behavioural psychology, and intended and unintended outcomes, and carefully monitoring the outcomes for users.

Empower staff to deliver better services

The team operates in a high trust environment that allows for open communications, where ideas are challenged in a productive way. Team members are accountable to each other for progress, which is reported openly through sprint cycle planning and results discussions.

Senior management is supportive of the principle of experimentation, which creates an ecosystem in which the team can pursue data-driven results and challenge the status quo.

Design with users

Talent Cloud designs for and with three main user groups: job applicants/employees, hiring managers, and HR Advisors. Our product development cycle includes workshops and early theory testing, followed by wire frame testing sessions with potential users. Once the product is live, we test again with real users, and observe findings over time (not just in the first release.)

Build in accessibility from the start

Talent Cloud has taken a number of steps to advance accessibility beyond meeting WCAG AA standards. One of the team’s earliest hires to the development team was someone with accessibility expertise. This has ensured that accessibility considerations have been part of all of our proposed features at an early stage of design - not as a retrofit of a predetermined feature. We also work with Fable Tech Labs who help coordinate testing of our products and features real people who require assistive technologies to access the web as early as possible during development. While WCAG AA provides a baseline, audits from real users lets us deliver a quality above and beyond the minimum requirements, because we want to make sure everyone has a pleasant experience on our platform.

Collaborate widely

Talent Cloud is a partner funded experiment, which makes collaboration a core part of our governance and operating model. Over the course of the experiment, fifteen departments and agencies from across the GC, including those not under the Public Sector Employment Act, making the platform a truly horizontal initiative.

Beyond working with our partners and users, The team also collaborates widely on a national and international basis, sharing best practices and learning from experts around the world working in areas related to digital age service delivery, staffing modernization, the future of work, and citizen-inclusive design. The team engages with other governments at the working level, academia, not-for-profits, Indigenous communities and policy wonks keen to talk about reimagining government talent engines.

“Designing with users” is key to modern service delivery. But it’s not only the engagement in design that matters. It’s also essential that government teams push themselves to think critically about the diversity of their product’s user base, and whether or not the users who come forward to help with product testing are reflective of that diversity. If not, the product may not perform as well as intended once it hits the real world... or worse, it may perform to the advantage of some user groups at the cost of others. “Designing with users” comes with responsibility. After all, we’re talking about real humans.

Talent Cloud’s user testers are drawn from a community that includes (among others) people from a multitude of life paths and regions, Indigenous users, and people with alternative accessibility considerations. Our team is also reflective of this diversity.

Canada is a community of communities. Responsible user-centered design must meaningfully embody that diversity all the way through product development - not as an afterthought or an add on. While this isn’t always easy, it’s an ethical imperative and the only way to get a truly high quality product.