Hiring process in Victoria City, Canada.
The hiring process in Victoria Canada is not regulated by the Canadian government. In fact no one regulates it. This leads to subjective choices being made by employers and it leads to marginalization. A Canadian employer can hire anyone on the spot, without there being a job posting for the job, without an interview process and lastly even without references. Many qualified people do not make it through this selection process and it is believed that if there was a regulated hiring process that it would lead to a much fairer and objective hiring process that would lead to more equality, fairness and justice.
anuvdp 
This is a big subject! I shall ask: what would regulation look like to you?
My thoughts are unsupportive about this subject, depending on how the process is designed. I think as an employee I’d rather be hired because I can do the work (easy to verify) and my personality and work style fits with the organizational culture (I trust a hiring manager to judge that). As a person who’s hired a few freelancers before, I definitely prefer to judge for myself what a person’s communication skills and work approach are like, before I’d want to spend any effort on reading their resume.
At places that have merit-based hiring requirements such as universities and government, you need to have a standardized (impersonal) resume and a cover letter that contains all the right bullet points for the job posting. And if you actually get hired, you find out very late in the game that you may not fit with the organizational culture.
I suppose it depends on what a regulated system would look like. It’s great to have fair hiring practices, but at what expense? With regulations, people need to know them, and some people inevitable are able to start looking for loopholes or opportunities to leverage their assets in the situation. In my opinion, resumes would become even more phoney than they already are. And you could still lose people who are great at their skills but who don’t conform to the structure for ethnicity, disability, age, gender, and other factors.
For example, I often prefer a contact who has abilities and disabilities I know about already, and I’ve seen at times how they accommodate their own needs and how confident they are with their choices. That’s important information to me, if I’m hiring someone who’s going to work for my business. I believe resumes need to allowed to become more personal, not more stale, at least for smaller organizations.
Thank you for your reply. Let me try to respond to your question of what would regulation look like. My experience in Victoria BC is that the more qualified I become the less likely it seems to gain employment in any fields. I have been working for the biggest retail employer in Canada for the last seven years. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and a post diploma degree. I have been working as a Garden Center employee, an Instock employee, a Receiving employee, a Seasonal Department employee and now a Stationery employee. While I was a Receiving employee the private company got the best inventory ever, but I was not rewarded for my work scanning all the incoming items. In fact throughout the last 7 years I have applied for 10 to 20 department manager jobs and I think I had 3 interviews out of all of them. In the last 3 months, 4 department manager jobs were just given to associates without going through a fair process and I have noticed numerous employees getting positions in the store that were never posted. What I would propose is that a job posting be posted, then a selection be made, then interviews had, a second selection made, and references telephoned. I would suggest that this process be audited by the government because if there are zero laws regarding the hiring process in Canada, then any internal hiring process audit really has no leverage. I would suggest that when the government does the audit for the job that one also looks at the resume of the person seeking employment to see if there is an objective match, versus a subjective one. This will enable people from falling through the cracks. This hiring process would be intended to at least attempt to less the inequalities in the work force. My experience is not only based on my experience with the private company, but also it is based on doing volunteer work for 3 not for profit organizations where I have witnessed individuals been assigned paid jobs without going through any kind of correct hiring process.