So I saw a job ad on LinkedIn announcing that the CRA was hiring new personnel to answer phones for people with questions about their taxes. Being that I’m someone looking for a job, I decided to go to the CRA web site and submit my candidature. Several days later they still don’t have it, nor — as far as I can tell — do they have anyone’s candidature since posting the ad, and the weird thing is that they seem to be blissfully unaware of this. Let me walk you through the process and you’ll see why.
First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link. 
I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.
In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.
In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.
And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.
But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.
I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.
So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.
Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.