Workopolis working on glitch that results in old postings on federal job bank

OTTAWA – The employment website Workopolis says it is working to fix a glitch that allows hundreds of outdated job postings to remain on the federal government’s online job bank.

Peter Harris, a spokesman for Workopolis, says part of the problem is some employers have failed to notify the site when their jobs have been filled.

Ottawa’s job bank, meantime, features those Workopolis ads in addition to job postings from other private-sector sites and provincial government job listing services.

The Conservative government has said it’s up to employers to remove the postings, but Employment Minister Jason Kenney is also pointing the finger at Workopolis.

Kenney says the government is working with the site to repair a technical problem that results in the job bank showing expired postings, some of which are a year old.

The minister often cites the tens of thousands of jobs posted on the job bank — there were more than 116,000 as of today — and the seven million hits it receives each month as evidence of its rousing success.

The job bank also plays a critical role in Canada’s embattled temporary foreign workers program. The rules require would-be employers to post ads seeking Canadian workers for four weeks before they apply to hire temporary foreign workers.

As well, the government uses the job bank to point employment insurance recipients to openings.

But the site shows a litany of job postings in dozens of communities across Canada that have long since been filled. They include ads for food servers, pipeline engineers, auto mechanics and retail sales clerks.

Follow Lee-Anne Goodman on Twitter at @leeanne25