My surprising stint as letter carrier for Canada Post.

Actually the position was Temporary On-Call Letter Carrier meaning they can call you anytime (or not) for a few hours of work (or not).

It was last spring and freelance was slow when I’d seen this opportunity and it was just 5 minutes away from home.

I’d remembered that as a kid I’d thought that delivering mail was such a neat job so I figured, why not go for it. It might be fun and I could easily work around it when the freelance woke up again.

I applied online and immediately upon completing, I received the typical automatic reply along the lines of, only those candidates deemed worthy of human contact will be notified. Blah, blah, blah.

No surprise here.

A week later I received an email from Canada Post HR inviting me to take their online assessment otherwise know as the General Abilities Test.

No surprise here. I obviously nailed it.

After passing the 90-minute online test, the following steps were up next, all of which needed to be completed successfully to carry on down the rabbit hole:

• Personnel Screening Part 1 / Interview for which a character reference, driver’s abstract and passport were required.
• Personnel Screening Part 2 / fingerprinting
• Pre-Placement Functional Assessment at a physiotherapy clinic.
• Then thirteen days of training with both a written and practical test.

No surprise here either. After all, hiring is tough and you hope to get it done the first time, right?

I was successful in completing all the above and soon began getting calls to come in to work. I was a postman albeit a temporary on-call postman.

Sadly it only took 48 sporadic hours of work over 6 weeks to realize that this wasn’t
for me.

No surprise here as well.
Note: I have a newfound respect for the folks who do this day-in, day-out.

What is surprising however is that Canada Post didn’t follow up to find out why I quit which I can only assume is standard practice.

After developing such an involved screening process and substantially investing both time and money for training, I would want to know where things fell short.
Wouldn’t you?

Maybe the process needs a little tweaking or maybe even a complete rethink but they won’t know because they don’t follow up.

However this is Canada Post I’m talking about and for many people
there’s no surprise here.

Advertisement