Public Sector Informant | Defence Jobs Australia glitch makes celebrity look like recruiter

Or perhaps Jennifer Coolidge, who's experiencing somewhat of a career renaissance following her role in White Lotus, is making a late career pivot to Defence ambassador?

Either way, a post by US celebrity publication InStyle featuring the actor was spotted with a tag suggesting it was a paid ad by Defence Jobs Australia.

Maybe the simpler explanation is that it's just an embarrassing booking error.

Defence said it pays for pre-roll advertisements, adding users should have seen "promoted" instead of "Promoted by Defence Jobs Aust". It has reported the "technical error" to Twitter.

It comes at an interesting time for the recruitment agency.

Defence Jobs was operated by ManpowerGroup for more than 15 years until new Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh announced a switch-up just over a month ago.

Adecco Australia began the transition handover last month and will be responsible for Defence recruitment targets from mid-next year.

It's a monumental task ahead with the Australian Defence Force making it no secret it's struggling to attract and retain talent.

Maybe Ms Coolidge - who's well-known for being Stifler's mum in the raunchy teen comedy franchise American Pie - has some part to play still.

Former government services minister Stuart Robert has been flatly told to stop contacting the public servants over whom he was once lord and master.

The rebuke came at the end of a Bill Shorten Dorothy Dixer, which highlighted "concerning" media reports the former minister met with consultants who then helped a separate company win contracts valued at $274 million.

It's understandable then that the former minister, who rejected the "imputation" he had influenced the procurement process, might want access to the departmental records to make his defence.

But Mr Shorten wants him to "please come through my office".

"Do not do what you did this morning, and inappropriately task and pressure public servants, who are no longer your ministerial responsibility," Mr Shorten said.

More can be revealed about what happened within Foreign Affairs Department's offices around the time a minor administrative change turned into an international diplomatic blunder.

Officials within DFAT's Middle East Branch sought to update Israel's online country brief after a Guardian journalist began asking questions, according to a freedom of information request we recently received.

The documents show someone within the branch asked the digital publishing to remove a few sentences relating to the former government decision to recognise West Jerusalem as the capital instead of Tel Aviv.

Later that day, the Guardian published a story about the quiet change, forcing the government's hand and setting the wheels in motion.

The next day Foreign Minister Penny Wong admitted someone had prematurely hit go on the webpage but she didn't want to point fingers.

We can only imagine the "please explain" meetings that were underway that morning.

If your organisation is having trouble finding ICT workers, there's about to be a whole lot more in the market.

Up to 1000 ICT contractors are finishing up at Services Australia over the next few weeks, the agency says. Just in time for Christmas.

The agency told The Canberra Times it was as a result of major projects and the COVID pandemic response wrapping up.

The agency said it's offered support for those impacted, and reached out to other APS agencies who may be in a position to offer them opportunities - gruelling Centrelink application not required.

There won't be any shortage of need in Canberra. The APSJobs site has more than 131 current listings for ICT workers in the ACT.

Most listings have an open-ended number of positions because filling any in a recruitment round is tough.

The public service's promotions watchdog is sharpening its axe and it has agencies who automate recruitment tools in its sights.

In its latest guidance, the Merit Protection Commissioner has outlined some of the myths about using artificial intelligence to screen applicants for roles.

While it was great for speeding up the often drawn out process, it could also produce biased results.

It also revealed the commission surveyed 66 APS agencies surveyed this year with nearly a quarter admitting they had used AI-assisted and automated tools in their recruitment processes in the last 12 months.

One of those, as outlined in its latest annual report, was Services Australia, which it used as a case study in what not to do.

The central welfare agency was forced to overhaul its hiring selection processes after 12 promotions were overturned by the promotions umpire.

And that's why robots aren't quite ready to rule the world.

While we're on the topic, we've heard there's another project at Services Australia impacted by the mass-layoff of ICT contractors at the agency.

The team managing the government resource planning platform, known as GovERP, was given plenty of cash and resourcing at the 2021 federal budget but its luck has run out a year on with ICT jobs being slashed.

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The massive SAP S/4 HANA implementation will eventually manage the payroll for almost every public servant across the APS, apart from Defence.

As an aside, Defence is spending about $1 billion on its own ERP, also based on S/4 HANA.

The kicker is that GovERP won't even have its first departments onboarded until next year. Our sources say it's far from ready and now doesn't have enough staff to finish it.

Why did the agency forget to mention a major whole-of-government project was losing most of its 250 ICT workers? Well, that's a mystery.

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