Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs
Issue 6 - Evidence - June 20, 2012
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 20, 2012
The Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 12:12 p.m. to study the services and benefits provided to members of the Canadian Forces; to veterans; to members and former members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and their families.
Senator Roméo Antonius Dallaire (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome. We are continuing our study on the services and benefits provided to Canadian Forces veterans and former members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their families as they transition into civilian life.
This has been an eye-opening exercise for us, and we are keen to hear from industry directly about how they perceive their role in this scenario.
With us today is Karen Ritchie, Director of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition at Home Depot Canada. Thank you for responding to our invitation. Please proceed with your opening statement.
Karen Ritchie, Director of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition, Home Depot Canada: I wish to thank the committee for the opportunity to appear here today. Veterans are near and dear to our hearts and we hope that our contribution this afternoon will shed some light on how we can all help them successfully transition from their careers in the service to meaningful careers in the retail sector with companies like Home Depot.
I would like to personally recognize the chair of this committee and thank him for his commendable service in the Armed Forces and to our country. The world over, the name Roméo Dallaire is synonymous with dedication to justice and the pursuit of peace. It is an honour to be before you today.
I will begin by sharing with the committee some general information about Home Depot. I will then speak more specifically about our efforts to engage veterans. My remarks will be brief in the hope that we will have ample time for questions and discussion.
As some of you may be aware, Home Depot Canada is the Canadian arm of the largest home improvement retailer. We are a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange and are included in the Standard & Poor's 500 and Dow Jones 30 industrial indexes.
Globally we employ over 300,000 associates in 2,200 stores. In Canada, we operate 180 stores and employ over 27,000 associates in all 10 provinces. Unfortunately, we have not made our way to the territories yet.
Home Depot Canada caters to do-it-yourselfers. Perhaps there are some in the room here today. We also focus on home improvement, construction and building maintenance professionals. Typical stores stock approximately 40,000 different building materials, home improvement supplies and lawn and garden products.
Through our Home Depot Canada Foundation and the Team Depot program, we encourage associates in all our stores to be involved in their community by organizing and volunteering on projects with local and national partners. Each year Home Depot Canada contributes over 60,000 hours of volunteer service to community projects across Canada. We consider this involvement to be positive both for the communities we operate in and for our associates, as it gives them a tremendous sense of value and collective accomplishment.
The projects we partner in vary widely. They include giving a fresh coat of paint to a Boys and Girls Club in Edmonton, building an outreach centre in the Ktunaxa Nation in Cranbrook, British Columbia, and working with Habitat for Humanity in any number of communities across the country. In fact, Habitat for Humanity is our largest charitable partner, receiving over $4 million in cash and products to this day.
With regard to our work to help veterans transition into careers at the Home Depot, for several years we have made it a priority to reach out to veterans and their spouses. Although we do not have a specific human resources program for them, we do make significant efforts through specialized recruitment processes. We begin recruiting in January each year for seasonal positions across Canada in preparation for spring, which is our busiest selling and hiring season. In 2012, we hired approximately 6,000 associates across Canada. As an employer of choice, we strive to attract, hire and retain a highly qualified and diverse workforce, reflective of the communities we serve. We have a comprehensive media plan to drive applicant traffic to our stores, focused primarily on students, seniors, diverse applicants and the military.
We advertise widely in Canadian Forces military newspapers, which reach thousands of members of the Canadian Forces and their families every week. We also target military personnel through Facebook and other forms of social media. In addition, we have had success with certain networks like www.hirecanadianmilitary.com and www.hiremilitaryspouse.ca.
We have many examples of veterans working at the store level and in corporate roles who joined Home Depot over the past 10 years. There is no unique career path. At store level, some associates retired from the military and joined us on a part-time basis; some work evenings and weekends around their full-time schedule with the military; and others have grown their careers with us from cashier to store manager. At our corporate office in Toronto, we have veterans working as managers, senior managers and directors in supply chain, learning, e-commerce and IT.
It is difficult for us to provide concrete numbers of veterans employed across Canada. We recently launched an "employee self-service " system, which asks associates to voluntarily identify their military service in terms of previous service in the regular forces, previous service in the reserves and current service in the reserves. We have to have that program on a voluntary basis due to privacy legislation. We know, however, that our online advertising this year resulted in almost 13,000 clicks to our career pages; and we had 95 applicants apply to our jobs during the period of January to June 2012. Those were tracked primarily back to www.hirecanadianmilitary.com. We also offer a military reservist leave policy for associates who may need to take a leave to fulfill their reserve commitments.
Having veterans work in our stores across Canada as well as in our corporate office has been an extremely positive experience for Home Depot. The energy, experience and professionalism they bring to our team is noticeable, as is the high level of training and skill they bring to their work. We certainly hope to continue exploring ways to maintain and build on these efforts.
I would like to thank the committee once again and invite the committee members to ask any questions they may have at this time.
The Chair: Thank you for being succinct in your presentation, Ms. Ritchie.
Senator Plett: Ms. Ritchie, I certainly appreciate everything that you have said. I have a Home Depot just a few blocks from where I live. Certainly, I am there quite often.
Ms. Ritchie: That is great. Thank you for your patronage.
Senator Plett: You gave the chair some accolades in your comments, and I think we need to give you some as well for what you do. Certainly, I enjoy shopping there. It costs me a lot of money because I usually buy more than I plan to buy.
In the United States you have an initiative called Operation Career Front, which focuses primarily on veterans. You have hired more than 60,000 veterans since 2004. You stated in your comments that it is difficult to establish exactly how many veterans you have. Maybe I misread or did not hear correctly, but do you have a program that specifically targets this? This looks specifically to me like you are open to veterans applying. Do they have any first right of position when they apply? Do you have anything that specifically targets veterans when they apply, for example priority opportunity for disabled veterans? Could you elaborate more on that, please?
Ms. Ritchie: Certainly. We hold many career fairs at our store level, particularly in communities close to bases. Our local human resources managers do outreach to the area bases and encourage them to attend our career fairs. We target, as I mentioned, through certain means. We try to target military service personnel, both current and retired, to attract them to work for us.
In terms of a first point of entry, if you will, we are open to all. We have always strived to ensure that our store demographics reflect the surrounding community — people from the military, students, diverse associates, et cetera. There is not a priority, but we do a fair bit of outreach to encourage the military to come and work for us. We have had successes more through anecdotal examples. We have had associates who have been deemed to be top performers who are retired from the military. We have some examples of retired associates from the military who have received our customer service all-star awards. We know that our recruitment efforts have been successful through anecdotal stories of great military associates who work in our stores.
Senator Plett: You are one company, whether in Canada or in the United States.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes.
Senator Plett: Would it not be relatively easy for the Canadian operation to adopt an initiative like Operation Career Front? Have you given any thought to that?
Ms. Ritchie: We have thought about it. We speak frequently with our U.S. colleagues to share best practices; and we leverage, where we can, what they are doing. That is one of their programs. The U.S. Home Depot Foundation is placing more of a special emphasis on serving U.S. military veterans as well.
However, it is a different situation in Canada compared to the U.S., where 2 million Americans have been deployed to two wars over the past 10 years. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison in terms of some of the Canadian initiatives, but certainly we leverage, where we can, some of the great things going on in the U.S. to put them in place here.
Senator Plett: You said that it is a voluntary initiative for veterans to say that they are veterans.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes.
Senator Plett: Is there reluctance on the part of veterans to give that information? Do you have any idea about that?
Ms. Ritchie: I would not say there is reluctance on the part of the veterans. However, given that it is a relatively new program for our organization, we definitely are planning to relaunch it for all our associates. It is voluntary for all associates due to the privacy legislation. I really cannot say that veterans are reluctant. Overall, because it is a new initiative for us, many of our associates are a bit reluctant to voluntarily self-identify, if you will. We are planning to relaunch it because we want to be able to quantify the number of current and retired military who work with us as well as the other demographics.
The Chair: Ms. Ritchie, why do you use the term "associates " all the time? I did not pick that up in the document.
Ms. Ritchie: We refer to our employees as associates.
The Chair: Do they own a share in the company?
Senator Nolin: No.
Ms. Ritchie: No, but they can purchase shares in the company because we have a share purchase plan. Some of our associates own shares in the company. I guess it is just an internal language reference.
The Chair: It is part of the culture.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes. We refer to them as our associates rather than as our employees.
Senator Nolin: I will go back to your effort to figure out the number of personnel with military background. I am sure you maintain a record of each employee.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes.
Senator Nolin: For example, if you were to decide to hire me or Senator Day, you would compare what I have done in the past with what he has done in the past. Would it not be written somewhere that I spent 10 years in the military or that he spent five years in the military? That is private information, but the law only prevents you from giving the name of the person publicly.
However, for statistical reasons, I think it would be easy for you to say, "We have 20 out of 6,000 hired up to now in 2012. " I am sure you can find out fairly easily how many have a military background. Is that not the case?
Ms. Ritchie: You are correct that it would be reflected on the resumé. We just implemented an applicant tracking system in 2008. We have applicants to Home Depot apply online, so there is a central database of resumés. We would have to do it through manual effort. We would have to pull the names of all those 6,000 associates, pull their resumés and then cross reference to see who would have previous military experience. We have not done that.
Senator Nolin: Let us look at the solution from a different angle. What should the Government of Canada do to encourage corporations like yours to hire former military personnel?
Ms. Ritchie: I do have some suggestions. There are certainly some ways. As I mentioned, we are a national company; we have stores across Canada. For us, it is much easier when we are able to either link through some central area to our career pages or post our jobs across Canada on a national site. One suggestion could be posting a link to our career pages on the Veterans Affairs Canada site or something of that nature. That would be a partnership.
Senator Nolin: Like you have in the U.S.
Ms. Ritchie: That would be wonderful. Another suggestion would be to look at local transition programs that employers can tap into to hire veterans on a temporary or seasonal basis. That would be more of a decentralized approach where we would tap into those local transition programs.
Many large organizations do participate in the Top 100 Employers competition sponsored through Mediacorp, and, within that competition, there are sub-categories where organizations are recognized as being the best employer for new Canadians or the best employer for employees over age 50 or for students and that kind of thing. There may be an opportunity to include a best employer for hiring people from the military. That is one possibility.
The Chair: Does it not exist now?
Ms. Ritchie: I am not sure. I do not believe so.
Senator Nolin: I think it exists in the U.S.
Ms. Ritchie: I believe that the military.com website is working on a system already where, as I understand it, men and women from the service can enter their military occupation code, and the system would translate it into an equivalent retail job. Often, on resumés, we will see the position title that the person held in the military, but sometimes, in brackets, it will say "logistics analyst " or something of that nature. That is another possibility to help employers understand where the skills lie for some of the military folks.
Senator Nolin: The last part of the answer is a nice bridge with the witnesses we had a few weeks ago from British Columbia, with whom we were talking about those equivalents.
I am sure that in the U.S. it is the same as in Canada — some veterans are injured, but they are fit to work.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes.
Senator Nolin: I am sure that in the U.S. your corporation has programs to facilitate the hiring of injured veterans. Do you have the same thing in Canada?
Ms. Ritchie: We do. We currently have associates who are in wheelchairs or who have other impairments — visual impairments and such — working at our stores. We have some programs, such as a scheduling accommodation program, that assist our associates with any specific needs, be it time off work, adjusted work schedules and such. We also have an employee assistance program that is available to all of our associates and assists them in finding links or resources — lists of physicians and that kind of thing — to help with whatever the impairment is. We also offer group benefits for full- and part-time associates, so that is where there may be assistance to pay for some of those services. Those are the programs that we currently have available.
Senator Wallin: I just want to pick up on a point, and it is something we have looked at in the Defence Committee. You have a leave policy for reservists. Can you explain that? One of the other issues that people have been wrestling with is whether or not there should be compensation for employers for doing this. We have heard mixed views on that — "No, we want to do our bit for the country, " and, "If you are a small business, sometimes it is prohibitively expensive. " Where do you come down on all of this?
Ms. Ritchie: We do have a policy that allows associates to take leave from their jobs to fulfill their reservist responsibilities and then return to their former position. It is currently an unpaid program. However, the job is held for them. I know what Karen Ritchie's opinion would be. I should perhaps not speak on behalf of Home Depot at this point, but I certainly hear what you are saying that there is a much greater financial burden for smaller employers than for larger employers. We certainly have the policy. We want to support the efforts.
Senator Wallin: You will continue whether or not you are compensated?
Ms. Ritchie: Yes, we will and have been.
Senator Wallin: If people were doing a tour of duty rather than just reservist commitments, is that fine too? Nine months plus six months or whatever it might be?
Ms. Ritchie: That would be fine as well.
The Chair: We are seeing the reservists, more and more, getting regular-force training. This means they could be gone for two and half or three months and so on at unusual times of the year, including the summertime, which is a high tempo time. Can you actually confirm that there is no reticence whatsoever to hiring people who are in the reserves and may have a requirement like that and that there is flexibility, right down to the store level, in permitting them to do these relatively lengthy programs and courses?
Ms. Ritchie: I would say that we definitely do support that. You are right to mention peak hiring times or peak busy times, but we often have many associates at that time. During the summer, we have several students as well. We are normally able to cover those leaves because it is important for our organization to support that.
Senator Day: Welcome. I will follow up on some of the questions already asked by my colleagues. One of the advantages of being the last questioner here is that you get some ideas from them.
The Chair: There will be a second round.
Senator Day: Maybe they will pick up some ideas from me then.
I presume the statistics that our researchers got for us are accurate. It indicates here that in an article in G.I. Jobs, a U.S. publication, the chairman and CEO of the U.S. company, Frank Blake, indicated that 35,000 veterans work as associates. Presumably, that is just in the United States because you said you are not tracking it in Canada the same way.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes.
Senator Day: Also, 1,500 associates are severing on active duty. I would presume that that would be reservists called up for fulltime service for a period of time?
Ms. Ritchie: Yes, and I would agree that that would be the folks in the U.S. stores.
Senator Day: They are able to track that in the U.S., but you have not gotten to that stage yet?
Did I understand correctly that voluntary self-identification is a requirement under our legislation here? Can you look in the employment records and use numbers and figures as opposed to individual names?
Ms. Ritchie: Certainly we can look in our records. We can look in our employee files, if you will, and track that data. Unfortunately, it is a manual process right now, so the employee self-service would help us to be able to pull reports on it in a more automated, easy way. We are relaunching it to encourage greater participation across the organization so we will be able to pull better statistics.
Senator Day: I would think that your ability to advertise and to make it known that you are hiring veterans and you like to have veterans who are transitioning into civilian life would help in recruiting as well, get the word out that there is an opportunities for retiring veterans.
Ms. Ritchie: Yes, absolutely, yes.
Senator Day: The equivalency is an item we have talked about a number of times. You talk in general terms about professionalism and experience and energy, and that is why you like to hire these transitioning veterans, or reservists as well presumably.
However, do you have any specific requirements? Do you have to hire an electrician who has an electrician's national ticket as part of your hiring requirements? Have you done any comparison of the equivalency, or do you do some transitioning educational work for someone coming out of the military with military qualifications? Do you have any programs in place, educational programs or otherwise, to help those employees fit into your designated requirements?
Ms. Ritchie: We do not have a requirement that you have to have a ticket or a licence, be a certified electrician or certified plumber, for example. We do not have that as part of our hiring criteria. We do have an in-depth product knowledge training that we put all our associates through depending on the department they are working in. In some cases, it can be 20 to 24 hours of training. We certainly offer that. We offer training programs. That being said, those programs are available to everyone.
Our former tagline used to be, "If you don't know, we'd like to teach you! " We had an advertising campaign where we would present three different hammers. One was a tack hammer, and then two others, three different types. We would ask which one was the tack hammer, and the tagline would be "If you know, we want to talk to you! If you don't, we'd like to teach you! "
We do have an in-depth product knowledge training that we offer to all associates, and we do not require people to be licensed tradespeople. That being said, we certainly have skilled tradespeople or ticketed tradespeople who may be retired, who may have left their trade and now work with us on a part-time basis, so we certainly have them working in our stores, but it is not a hard-and-fast requirement to have that.
Senator Day: That is not an impediment to hiring?
Ms. Ritchie: Not at all.
Senator Day: That is good news.
The other area I wanted you to comment on briefly, in terms of hiring veterans with disabilities, is what kind of programs you have to provide special attention to ensure that they do not have a relapse, that they are fitting in well after you have hired them. Do you have any programs in place for that?
Ms. Ritchie: We have HR managers in each of our stores, so often with new associates or associates who require special accommodation we set up a buddy system so we are able to ensure they have all the required accommodation and special tools they need to be able to work in our stores. That is how we approach it.
Senator Day: I understood from your answer earlier that you do not have a relationship with Veterans Affairs Canada or the Armed Forces at this time for someone who might be suffering minor post-traumatic stress or operational injury and may be attending one day at a week at a facility that is owned and operated by the Armed Forces or Veterans Affairs. You have no relationship with that?
Ms. Ritchie: We do not have any formal partnerships at this point. In the local areas where we have a store, like Belleville for example, we do outreach to the local bases and encourage folks from there to come and work at our stores as well, but not a formal partnership, no.
Senator Day: I congratulate you on the awards you received from the Canadian Forces Liaison Council, specifically with the reserves. It is wonderful you are doing that, and keep up the good work.
Ms. Ritchie: Thank you.
The Chair: I would like to go into a couple of these elements, if I may.
Let us put the shoe on the other foot and say have DND and Veterans Affairs through their instruments of transition of veterans to civilian industry established any formal communications with your company or with the industry at large in regard to hiring veterans?
Ms. Ritchie: I have not seen anything in particular. We belong to the Retail Council of Canada. To me, that would be the main contact that should be made, and I have not come across it myself.
The Chair: Nor have they locally approached you. Both these departments are spread across the country, as you are, and have assets across the country. Have they at the local level come forward in seeking to establish these links with you in regard to hiring practices?
Ms. Ritchie: That is a bit more difficult for me to comment on because we have 180 stores across Canada. I could check and come back to the committee on that. I cannot definitively say. They perhaps have in certain communities and not in others. I could certainly come back to you on that.
The Chair: Thank you very much. I hope you feel at ease, and please tell me if you are not. I am looking at your competitors, Rona, Canadian Tire and so on, which is a bit of a delicate position. Have you seen initiatives as you work through the retail association in these other areas or lack thereof that could be brought to our attention?
Ms. Ritchie: I am just thinking through. Rona is more focused on the Olympics, so no I have not seen any with any of my colleagues.
The Chair: The people from the military are often qualified with a significant amount of leadership skills. Could you remind me what the title of your program is?
Ms. Ritchie: Store Leadership Program.
The Chair: Yes, would that not be an element that you would particularly seek in your hiring practices that would call for you wanting to know on your forms that you will digitize whether the person is ex-military or a veteran?
Ms. Ritchie: Yes, and I know of a couple of applicants that came through that program, some of the ones I referenced here, that continue to work at Home Depot and are in positions of leadership. Either they have been placed in a store manager role through the Store Leadership Program, or in some cases they are working as senior managers at our corporate office.
The Chair: My question is more, because you know what the product is, they have leadership skills and are used to working in teams, very practical people, visual people, would that not be a set of criteria that would call upon you in your application form to determine whether you have been in the military or are a veteran? Would you find that information something to include in your process of hiring?
Ms. Ritchie: Yes. It is definitely something to consider. At this point, it is not part of the form. We are able to see that by reviewing the resumé. It is not a separate question, but it is certainly something to consider.
The Chair: Colleagues, are there any supplemental questions?
Senator Day: Other than to compliment the witness?
The Chair: Absolutely. We have chosen well to have you appear before us.
Senator Plett: Referring to U.S. policies, they have programs where they encourage spouses as well. However, there are certain companies that prefer not to have a husband and wife working in the same company or closely connected.
What is Home Depot's policy on that? If a veteran is working in your store, would you encourage a spouse to apply to work in that same store, or do you have a policy on that?
Ms. Ritchie: We do have a policy on that, and our only criterion is that we cannot have family members reporting to each other. We would obviously not want a wife reporting to a husband — that would not work — or a family member reporting to another family member.
With that said, we have many family members working in the same store, certainly.
Senator Plett: I want to thank you for what you do and simply encourage you to continue and advance your programs even further. If you have something that you would like the government to do, please do not be shy about that; very few people are.
Senator Day: I note, Mr. Chair — Ms. Ritchie, you might be interested in this — our researchers found that among the Home Depot, the U.S. Department of Defence, Labour and Veterans Affairs in the U.S., there is an operations career front. There is obviously a closer relationship between Veterans Affairs and the company there than we have here in Canada.
If we could in any way help facilitate a close relationship there or if there is anything our chair might be able to do, I am sure we would be very pleased to help out in that regard.
Ms. Ritchie: That is great. Thank you.
The Chair: Your initiatives and the ideas you shared with us through Senator Nolin's questions are most appreciated. We hope you will take back those ideas and push for implementation of them, which could be exemplary for the rest of the industry, but it is certainly not within our purview to pursue that; I am just offering a comment.
We are seeing the children of injured modern-day veterans also coming under enormous stress and duress. Would you see them having the possibility of being considered for employment that might be specified in your listing?
Ms. Ritchie: Yes, absolutely, depending on the age. Certainly we would. As I touched on, we hire a number of students to work part-time in our stores as well, so certainly we encourage them to apply to work with us.
The Chair: We hope your system continues to mature and acquire more capability. We commend your company. Please pass on to the authorities of the company that we think you have been quite exemplary in this and we hope others will follow. We will take good note of this in our report.
Ms. Ritchie: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Colleagues, thank you very much.
(The committee adjourned.)