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Arthur McInnis
March 11, 2026


Victoria’s HR Director Job Posting Is a Masterclass in What Not to Do

The City of Victoria is looking for its next top people leader. Its own job ad suggests they need one urgently.

Arthur McInnis

One Job, Three Full-Time Careers

Let’s start with what they’re asking for. The City of Victoria wants a single person to simultaneously run strategic corporate HR for an entire municipal government, personally negotiate collective agreements with unions, represent the City in administrative tribunals, advise elected Council members on high-stakes employment issues, manage occupational health and safety, oversee learning and development, and run its Human Resources Information System.  This is all while being a “visionary and emotionally intelligent leader” who “thrives in complex environments.”

That’s not a job description. That’s a hostage situation with a pension.

A role this sprawling typically gets divided across at least two or three senior positions in comparably sized organisations. By collapsing it all into one Director role, the City is either setting this person up for burnout or quietly signalling that many of these responsibilities will never get done well.

A Master’s Degree But No HR Designation Required?

The posting demands a Master’s degree. Fine. But it does not require or even prefer a Chartered Professional in Human Resources (CPHR) designation, the professional standard for senior HR practitioners in British Columbia.

More glaring still this person will be walking into Labour Relations Board hearings, Human Rights Tribunal proceedings, and collective agreement negotiations. These are quasi-judicial processes with real legal consequences. Yet the posting makes zero reference to legal training, labour law expertise, or experience working alongside labour counsel. A seasoned HR generalist with great “people skills” and a Master’s in Organisational Behaviour is not the same as someone who can go toe-to-toe with union lawyers at a tribunal.

The “equivalent combination of education and experience” escape hatch offers useful flexibility, but it cannot possibly compensate for what the posting simply forgot to ask for.

Equity as a Bumper Sticker, Not a Deliverable

The City loads the posting with earnest EDI language. There are reconciliation commitments, land acknowledgments and even encouragement for marginalised applicants. It checks every contemporary box.

And then it lists the Major Accountabilities.

Not one of them tasks the new Director with designing, leading, measuring, or being accountable for the City’s EDI programs. Reconciliation is mentioned as a “commitment”, presumably a personal value the candidate is expected to hold, rather than as an organisational program they will be responsible for advancing. If equity and inclusion are truly “cornerstones” of the City’s vision, why are they not cornerstones of this executive’s job description?

This is what performative EDI looks like.  It positions bold values language at the top yet zero operational accountability for those values in the role itself.

Sending a Municipal Email and Hoping for the Best

Here is how a City government responsible for a multi-million-dollar public budget wants executive candidates to apply for its most senior HR position.

Email one person. Kelly Erickson. City Manager’s Office. [mailto:kerickson@victoria.ca]. That’s it.

No external executive search firm. No structured Applicant Tracking System platform. No blind screening process. Just a municipal inbox belonging to a named individual in the City Manager’s Office. For a role at this seniority and salary level, this approach raises serious questions about confidentiality, data privacy, and procedural fairness. In fact, it raises serious questions about whether the City is already in the tank for someone.  Candidates, especially those currently employed in public-sector roles, are entitled to expect that their applications will be handled with discretion and through a process that minimises the risk of premature
disclosure.

Routing executive HR applications directly through the City Manager’s office is not just administratively clumsy, it signals exactly the kind of centralised, top-down control culture that drives good leaders away.

The City Cannot Even Agree on the Closing Date

In the body of the posting, the closing date is March 23, 2026. In the sidebar of the same advertisement, it reads March 24, 2026.

One day’s difference. Small, perhaps. But this is a posting published by a People and Culture department that is simultaneously asking you to trust them with workforce strategy for an entire City government. If the HR department cannot coordinate the details of its own job advertisement, what does that say about their capacity to deliver the complex multi-stakeholder programs described in the role?

The Uncomfortable Subtext

Taken together, these issues paint a picture of an organisation that is either under-resourced, internally siloed, or simply not giving this recruitment the strategic attention it deserves.

Victoria deserves strong municipal HR leadership. The community, the workforce, and the unions sitting across the table from this Director deserve it too. But if the City wants to attract the calibre of candidate described in its own flowery preamble, “visionary,” “emotionally intelligent,” someone who “thrives in complex environments”, it might want to start by demonstrating that it can run a clean, credible, and professionally executed recruitment process.

Right now, it has not.

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Appendix: The job posting on the City of Victoria website.