Canadian Security: You have been busy integrating all the companies it acquired over the last few years. What has that been like?

Marc-André Aubé: Since 2007 the management team has been busy repositioning the company on a solid basis from a systems standpoint coast-to-coast. The goal was to integrate all of the smaller companies which totalled about 20 different security solutions companies that we’ve purchased.
It was a challenge culturally to put all these companies together over the last four years. Our mission was to put them on a common system. It’s been more than a year and we have stabilized from a back office standpoint, and we are able to move to the next step. Our mission now is all about recruiting the right people. The challenge of the next decade will be staffing. We need to find the right people with the right skills that really differentiate us from the others and that’s what we’ve been focused on for the last year — finding the right tools to recruit and attract the best talent.

CS: How many employees does Garda have now?

Aubé: At last count we have about 20,000 employees in Canada. Every division has had growth. Pre-employment screening is growing very quickly. We have won some very large contracts with big organizations. If you look at the U.S., 95 per cent of organizations will do a criminal record check. In Canada it’s 35 per cent. At the same time, seven per cent will have a criminal record and 10 per cent have a credit problem. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be hired, but if you’re paying a head hunting firm to find someone why wouldn’t you pay an extra $50 for a background check?
It’s cheap to do a criminal and credit check in Canada and the price goes down with volume. We are also now checking suppliers for large corporations. This is a booming business and the demand is there. When companies get a presentation from us the reaction is usually, “Why weren’t we doing this before?” Or, “Why are we paying people internally when we can reduce costs by outsourcing it?” It’s an area that is growing for us by about 25 per cent a year. Some companies are doing background checks internally with their investigation departments and we tell them they can reduce their costs dramatically by outsourcing the task to us.

CS: What are you looking for when hiring new staff? Garda currently has a significant piece of the airport screening contract at Canada’s airports. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) has made it clear it wants better customer service from screeners at airports. Are you factoring that into your hiring and training?

Aubé: Generally speaking, I think CATSA and Garda are going in the right direction. The public deserves better quality of service. Our employees are more sensitive to providing the level of service the passenger deserves. It’s a sensitive issue in the U.S., so it’s had a ripple effect here. Definitely, the CATSA RFP is designed in that way and CATSA wants to improve the passenger flow. We are also focused more on increasing passenger flow and quality of service. It is a bit of a change — in the past there was more emphasis on security and even now the focus is on security but with more of an emphasis on customer service. What it comes down to is finding the right people depending on the needs of our clients. We have the entire spectrum from entry-level security to the higher more skilled people and everyone has a pay scale and bill rate that matches the need. That is done through a good scheduling system that we have, consistent across the country, which allows us to find in our database the right people with the right skills clients want. We’re also using Facebook and making better use of social networks to attract the best people. More importantly, we pay more. Paying more and giving more benefits helps us attract better people.

CS: And when the economy picks up it’s going to be even tougher to find those people.

Aubé: Yes, and in 2007 we did have a hard time finding those people. It was a mess; we had no résumés coming in and you had to pay more. But in 2008 the economy collapsed and we had an unemployment rate of 10 per cent which gave us a break in recruiting. But we’re preparing for the next wave. We are going to hit a wall and wages are going up. We’ve all had a break in the last two years, especially in Ontario, for finding the right people. It’s tough to find 25-year-olds who want to make $12/hour.