Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER December 11, 2017 2 NEWS Recent stories posted on www.hrreporter.com. Check the website daily for quick news hits from across Canada and around the world. WEB O N T H E ACROSS CANADA Ontario reforms labour laws, boosts base wage to $15 in 2019 Bill forms key pillar of Liberals' re-election platform Cost to fix Phoenix pay system to surpass $540 million, says auditor general Scathing review hints entire system should be scrapped Ontario college faculty return to work after legislation ends 5-week strike Tuition refunds offered to 500,000 students Quebec judge hears first arguments against province's face veil law Promises to deliver ruling as soon as possible regarding temporary suspension Shoppers Drug Mart issues job posting for medical marijuana brand manager Still currently illegal to distribute the drug through pharmacies Alberta puts up $40 million to help workers transition during coal power phase-out Money will top up benefits to 75 per cent of employee's previous earnings AROUND THE WORLD As NAFTA talks stall, Mexico raises minimum wage to $6 per day Increase won't 'do a darn thing for the workers in Mexico': Canadian union head Tech invading nearly all U.S. jobs, even lower skilled: Study Usage of digital tools increasing across occupations, underscores need for digital skills Shifting culture France still dogged by image of labour strife, but unions' roles are changing: Minister hrreporter.com FEATURED VIDEO LeNoury Law Proactive Advice to Management Employment Lawyer of The Year James LeNoury B.A. (Hons) M.A. LL.B 416-926-1107 • Toll Free 1-877-926-1107 • lenourylaw.com employment report, the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH). e ADP report also uses industry-specific variables such as confidence indices, housing per- mits and merchandise exports. "e information is based on real data, it is not a survey; it is timely, it is done once the payrolls are processed," said Jan Siegmund, CFO at ADP in New York, speak- ing at the launch on Nov. 16. "It will exemplify in a very big way how the HR industry and how all industry will evolve using big data, analytics and insights to drive bet- ter HR decisions, to make compa- nies more productive, more suc- cessful in the marketplace." ADP's data processing involves a number of steps, including the removal of outliers, identification of clients by industry to aggregate the individual data into industry/ super sector classifications, the creation of matched pairs, and seasonal adjustment. e raw data is also cleaned for outliers, anom- alies and inconsistencies, and the North American Industrial Clas- sification System (NAICS) is used for industry classification. e intention for now is to re- lease national numbers, said Ko- rmann, though numbers by state are released by ADP in the U.S. "We haven't set a release date for that, but it is fair to assume down the road we will have more granular information (for Cana- da) also by geography." Of course, Statistics Canada has two well-known reports around employment: e Labour Force Survey (LFS), based on a survey of about 56,000 households, and the SEPH, produced by a combi- nation of a census of payroll de- ductions provided by the Canada Revenue Agency, and the business payroll survey (BPS), which col- lects data from a sample of 15,000 businesses. The difference in method- ologies helps explain why ADP claimed employment in Canada decreased by 5,730 jobs in Oc- tober, compared to a net gain of 35,300 jobs reported by Statistics Canada in its LFS. More data appreciated Data from Statistics Canada has always been a challenge, accord- ing to Colin Busby, associate director of research at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto. "ere often tends to be quite a bit of coefficient variation, there's quite a bit of uncertainty, in the results when they first come out, and they're often revised quite heavily over time, and so it's a bit of a murky picture of the more re- cent labour market data." e sectoral breakdown in the SEPH tends to be a bit richer than the LFS and have more informa- tion, but the former struggles from a timeliness issue, he said. "So you're trying to get the right balance of timeliness and accura- cy, and that's why Statistics Can- ada has those two products. And ADP is there with a… rich data set that's trying to blend the two." "We'll have something nice to fill that lag, I think, that's valuable. And, at the same time, (to) stress- test the accuracy of the Labour Force Survey results when they come out, so those two things I see as an advantage." Busby said he doesn't discount the ability for ADP to play a wider role in the Canadian debate. "But it'll certainly take some time… for us to get a better un- derstanding of whether or not it's going to take on that position similar to what ADP does in the United States." Canada is in need of more la- bour market data — 1,000 per cent, said Dominic Lévesque, president of Randstad Profession- als in Montreal. "e market is changing, the landscape is changing really quickly, and the data we have of- ten relies on very old data," he said. "ere's a lot of things we can do based on the big data, and I think now what companies are re- alizing, and one of the things we're realizing as well, is that we have the data in the palm of our hands, we just don't know how to orga- nize it, how to capture the data. So if someone can help organize the data, someone that has access to that data, starts giving people access to the changes in the HR world, then this will help." "e more and more studies we have help push forward the impor- tance of having the data and help companies make good decisions in the human capital space." e data can be used by employ- ers for "total talent architecture," said Lévesque, which includes succession planning, career map- ping and people development. "(It's about) how do we influ- ence generations in terms of schools and universities, how can we take them from being gradu- ates to being CFOs or CEOs or COOs, so that's where the data comes into play: What does it look like in terms of developing people based on the needs of the organization?" "e depth matters more than size in terms of the studies being published, but I would actually say the more we have, the better it is, and every other source that gives us perspective outside of Statistics Canada is a really positive thing." Not a game-changer On the data front, things are im- proving, according to Don Drum- mond, citing the government's Job Vacancy and Wage Survey he helped to start back in 2011. "Our mainstay is the LFS and it's a reasonable survey. It's a sam- ple, obviously, but it's a fairly large one," said Drummond, adjunct professor at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. It doesn't really make sense to compare the LFS and the ADP re- port because one surveys employ- ees, the other employers, he said. "If you wanted to compare it, you would look from the SEPH survey… and that's what ADP is touting as the advantage of theirs, you'll get it sooner." Analysts don't use the SEPH very much, he said, citing a pref- erence for instant gratification. "No one seems to ever accept that these things are widely unreli- able on a month-to-month basis." However, clients of ADP are probably large ones, said Drum- mond, "so you've got a selection bias right there… I don't imagine little corner stores are having their payroll done by ADP, so you have to be careful about that part too, and it's probably quite skewed by sector." Is ADP's report life-changing or game-changing? Probably not, said Drummond, who cautioned people not to make a big deal out of the new numbers until we see how they line up with the SEPH. "I used to do U.S. forecasting; we'd look at (the ADP report), but I can't say it was a big factor in the life of doing forecasting, it was just another piece of information." Evert Akkerman, principal at XNL HR & Communications in Newmarket, Ont., is also not sure how helpful the ADP report will be when it comes to his work in recruitment. "I'm not waiting with bated breath for the next batch of job numbers because, to me, it doesn't really affect what I do — that's macro and when we're recruiting, I'm at the micro level, focused on that particular job for that par- ticular client." While the statistics may show hundreds of thousands of people are looking for work, for example, employers are still challenged in finding talent, he said, and the labour market reports don't measure two important factors: "mindset and attitude on the part of the applicants, and… how seri- ously people are looking for work." Meant to 'drive better HR decisions' LABOUR REPORT < pg. 1

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