City’s hiring practices need ‘significant improvement’: AG
HRM’S hiring process needs a lot of work.
The municipality’s auditor general Andrew Atherton said HRM’S hiring practices need significant improvement.
“We found issues in every file we looked at,” Atherton said in a statement following the release of his report to the audit and finance committee. “Issues included not adequately establishing evaluation criteria, inconsistent and unsupported screening and assessing of candidates, and failing to complete preemployment checks.”
He told the committee on Wednesday that “the audit results are not good. A lot of issues, a lot of concerns.”
Many policies were missing and there were few details on how to implement the policies that do exist, he said.
“We noted a lack of information to support diversity inclusion processes, we had concerns around monitoring of training requirements, we found access to hiring files was not appropriately restricted,” he said.
Atherton said it’s not to say the employees hired are not doing a good job, just that his office was focused just on the hiring process.
HRM employs more than 3,500 permanent full-time and part-time staff.
‘TRANSPARENCY IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT’
Atherton said justifications for choosing a candidate were often not well supported.
“For a public employer transparency is especially important; we expected the rationale for limiting competition to be clearly laid out in each case” he said in his statement.
The report, now on the AG website, includes 17 recommendations.
Atherton also followed up on a 2022 Management of Respectful Workplaces audit and told the committee only limited progress had been made. Five of the audit’s 15 recommendations have been implemented so far.
Some of these relate to establishing a whistleblower policy and monitoring of training and complaint files.
“HRM management has been slow to act on known gaps around maintaining respectful workplaces. We will continue to follow up on this audit in the future,” said Atherton in the statement.
“It was difficult to receive all of this, in a way,” said Deputy Mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon (Waverley - Fall River - Musquodoboit Valley).
She requested human resources submit an action plan on implementing audit recommendations to the committee within six months.
Coun. Pam Lovelace (Hammonds Plains - St. Margarets) said the auditor’s report validates some of the concerns she has and she was really disappointed by the fact that more than half of hiring managers lack diversity inclusion training.