You found a job you want. Maybe it's at a Canadian federal agency, a Crown corporation, or a municipal government. Maybe it's at CGI Federal in Virginia or Maryland — a government contractor with thousands of professionals supporting US federal agencies across defense, cybersecurity, healthcare, and more. Either way, the application sent you to a system called NJOYN.
This guide explains how NJOYN works, how to prepare your resume for it, and how to handle the parts of the application that most candidates rush through.
What NJOYN Is
NJOYN is an applicant tracking system built and operated by CGI, one of the largest IT and business consulting companies in the world, founded in 1976 in Montreal. CGI employs more than 90,000 professionals globally, including over 11,000 in Canada and roughly 8,000 in the United States through its subsidiary CGI Federal.
CGI serves the federal government and 75% of provincial and territorial governments in Canada, and holds over $1 billion in US federal contract obligations — supporting agencies across defense, intelligence, homeland security, justice, healthcare, and the environment. All CGI hiring, in both countries, runs through NJOYN at cgi.njoyn.com.
Beyond CGI's own hiring, NJOYN is also used by Canadian government agencies and Crown corporations including the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Canada Post.
If you are applying to Canadian public sector roles, or to CGI in either country, you are using the same platform.
How a NJOYN Application Actually Works
This is where most candidates go wrong: they assume a NJOYN application is the same as uploading a resume to any other job site. It is not.
A NJOYN application has three distinct components:
1. Your candidate profile
Before you apply to any specific job, NJOYN asks you to create a candidate profile. This is separate from any individual application. Your profile stores your background information and is associated with your account across all applications.
2. Your resume
You upload or paste your resume as part of the application. How the system processes this varies by employer implementation — more on that below.
3. Screening questions
This is the component most candidates underestimate. NJOYN allows employers to attach a structured questionnaire to each job posting. These are not optional and are not cosmetic. The platform explicitly scores candidates on their screening question responses. According to CGI's own product materials, "NJOYN assesses all applicants based on various surveys given by the recruiter to find out the best fit for the job."
In many Canadian public sector hiring processes — and in competitive CGI Federal roles — screening question responses carry as much weight as, or more weight than, the resume itself. The questions are the filter. Candidates who answer them with one-line responses while spending hours polishing their resume are optimizing for the wrong thing.
Preparing Your Resume for NJOYN
Formatting: expect it to be stripped
Canada Post, which uses NJOYN for its hiring, tells candidates directly on its help pages: "Create an unformatted résumé (no bullets, underlines or bold), as the system will remove most formatting when you paste it into your online profile."
This is a primary source — the employer itself, on its own NJOYN help page, telling you that formatting does not survive the process intact.
The practical implication: your resume's visual design is largely irrelevant for NJOYN applications. The tables, the two-column layout, the custom section headers, the bold job titles — much of this will not render as intended on the recruiter's side. What survives is your text.
This does not mean you should submit a sloppy document. It means you should write a resume where the content carries the weight, not the formatting. If your resume relies on visual hierarchy to communicate your qualifications, it needs to work in plain text too.
What to do:
- Write in clear, complete sentences and phrases that read well without formatting cues
- Use standard section names: Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications — creative alternatives may not be recognized
- Put your contact information in the main body of the document, not in a header or footer
- Test your resume by pasting the text into a plain text editor — if it still makes sense and reads clearly, it will survive the NJOYN process
Keywords: use the posting's language
NJOYN supports Boolean keyword search — recruiters can search candidate profiles using AND, OR, and bracket logic to find applicants whose profiles contain specific terms. That's the mechanism. But the reason it matters goes deeper than search syntax.
Job postings, recruiters, and the ATS they use all operate on the same vocabulary — the shared language of a role. When your resume uses different terms to describe the same work, the experience doesn't get flagged for the wrong reasons. It just doesn't get recognized. The recruiter searching for "zero trust architecture" isn't going to find your profile if you described the same work as "modern security frameworks." Both phrases are accurate. Only one is in the language the system is tuned to read.
For Canadian public sector roles in particular, the language in job postings is often precise and non-negotiable. A posting that requires experience with the Occupational Health and Safety Act is not looking for paraphrases. If you have that experience, those words need to appear in your resume in that form. The same logic applies to CGI Federal postings — a cybersecurity role may specify "CDM program experience" or "FedRAMP authorization" as distinct requirements, not umbrella terms.
What to do:
- Read the job posting carefully and note every required and preferred qualification
- Use the exact terminology from the posting where it accurately describes your experience — do not substitute synonyms if the posting uses specific terms
- Include both the full form and the acronym for designations and credentials where both appear in the posting (e.g., "Project Management Professional (PMP)")
- List qualifications explicitly in a Skills or Core Competencies section in addition to describing them in your experience bullets — a qualification mentioned only in prose may be missed
For a deeper look at how vocabulary alignment works — and why it matters across every application, not just NJOYN — see Keywords Aren't a Trick — They're a Translation Problem.
Tailoring: one resume per application
The job postings on NJOYN are specific. A federal government posting for a Senior Policy Analyst is not the same as a CGI Federal posting for a Cybersecurity Engineer supporting DHS. The required competencies, the language, and the evaluation criteria differ.
Generic resumes perform poorly. Tailor the language in your resume to the specific posting before you apply. This is more effort, but the roles that run through NJOYN are competitive — a tailored application is not an advantage, it is a baseline requirement.
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Who Uses NJOYN: A Reference for CGI and Canadian Public Sector Applicants
NJOYN is the platform for a specific and significant slice of the job market. This section covers what applicants to CGI Federal (US) and CGI Canada need to know — including what to emphasize on the resume for each context.
CGI Federal (United States)
CGI Federal supports US federal agencies across defense, cybersecurity, healthcare IT, homeland security, justice, and treasury. Its professionals are embedded in government programs — building systems, managing infrastructure, running security operations, and delivering large-scale IT modernization projects.
Roles include software engineers, systems architects, cybersecurity analysts, cloud engineers, project managers, business analysts, data scientists, and program managers. Concentrations are heaviest in the Washington DC metro area (Fairfax, VA is a major hub), but CGI Federal operates across more than 60 US locations.
What to emphasize on your resume for CGI Federal roles:
Background investigation is required for all US hires — this is stated plainly in CGI's application materials. Many roles require an active security clearance or the ability to obtain one. If you hold a clearance (Secret, TS, TS/SCI), state it clearly and prominently — cleared candidates are a smaller pool and it matters from the first screen.
For roles tied to specific federal programs, match your resume language to the agency and program context in the posting. A cybersecurity role supporting a DHS program uses different terminology than one supporting VA healthcare modernization. The posting tells you exactly what language to use.
Certifications carry weight in federal IT contracting in a way they do not in most private sector roles. If you hold CompTIA Security+, CISSP, PMP, AWS, or similar credentials that appear in the posting, list them in a dedicated section near the top of your resume — not buried in the body.
CGI Federal's average hiring process from application to offer runs approximately three weeks. Only candidates selected for interviews are contacted, so do not expect an interim acknowledgment after you apply.
CGI (Canada)
CGI's Canadian operation serves the federal government and 75% of provincial and territorial governments. Roles mirror the federal contracting profile — IT consulting, systems integration, application services, infrastructure — with the addition of bilingual requirements for many positions.
If you are a Canadian citizen eligible for a security clearance (even without currently holding one), this is worth stating for federal-facing roles. For Quebec-based or bilingual postings, functional French proficiency should be listed explicitly with your assessed level if you have one.
CGI's help desk for the NJOYN application system is reachable at candidate.njoynhelp@cgi.com (8 a.m. – 8 p.m. EST) if you encounter technical issues with the platform.
The Part That Actually Gets You Filtered: Screening Questions
Let's spend more time here because most resume guides do not.
NJOYN's screening questions are structured questionnaires that appear within the application flow. They typically ask you to confirm whether you meet specific qualifications — and then ask you to demonstrate that you do.
A common pattern looks like this:
Do you have experience developing policy in a regulatory environment? ☐ Yes ☐ No
If yes, please describe your experience: [text box]
Many candidates check "Yes" and write two sentences. This is the mistake.
The text box is your evidence. The recruiter is not taking your "Yes" at face value — they are reading what you wrote in the box to determine whether your claim is credible and relevant. A thin answer is effectively a no.
How to answer screening questions well
Use the STAR method. Canada Post's own guidance to candidates recommends this explicitly. STAR stands for:
- Situation — briefly describe the context
- Task — what was your responsibility
- Action — what you specifically did
- Result — what happened as a result
A STAR answer for the policy question above might look like:
"In my role as Policy Analyst at [Organization] from 2021 to 2023, I was responsible for developing and reviewing regulatory compliance policies for a team of 45 staff (Situation/Task). I led a cross-functional working group to revise our WHMIS compliance framework following a legislative update, drafting three new internal policies and updating fourteen existing procedures (Action). The revised framework passed our annual internal audit with zero findings for the first time in four years (Result)."
That answer takes 90 seconds to read and leaves no doubt. The two-sentence version leaves every doubt.
Mirror the posting language in your answers. The same vocabulary principle that applies to your resume applies to screening question responses. If the posting uses the phrase "stakeholder engagement," use that phrase in your answer — not "working with partners" or "coordinating with teams."
Write a full answer even when the question seems minor. If you are answering yes to a requirement, the text box is not optional detail — it is the substance of your application.
Do not answer yes to qualifications you do not have. Screening questions in public sector and government contracting roles are used to create a verified shortlist. Misrepresenting your qualifications is a serious matter and will surface in reference checks and background investigations.
A Pre-Submission Checklist
Before you submit any NJOYN application, run through this:
Resume
- Formatted so it reads clearly as plain text — paste into Notepad and check
- Contact information in the body of the document, not a header or footer
- Standard section headings used throughout
- Every required qualification from the posting appears in the resume using the posting's exact language
- Full form and acronym included for all credentials and designations
- Tailored to this specific posting, not a generic version
- If applying to a CGI Federal role: clearance level stated clearly if held; required certifications listed prominently near the top
Screening questions
- Every "Yes" answer is followed by a STAR-structured response in the text box
- Posting language is mirrored in question responses
- No thin or one-line answers where a text box is provided
- Answers are accurate and verifiable
Profile
- Candidate profile is complete and up to date
- Correct country selected when you created your profile
One More Thing: Bilingual Postings
NJOYN is a bilingual platform. Many Canadian federal government and CGI Canada postings require or prefer bilingual candidates, and some postings appear in French only. If you are applying to positions that require language proficiency, ensure your resume and screening question responses accurately reflect your assessed language level — government language assessments are specific (reading, writing, oral interaction) and self-reported levels are verified.
If a posting is available in French and you are bilingual, consider whether submitting in French is advantageous for the specific employer or role. For some positions and departments, it signals genuine proficiency rather than checking a box.
The Bottom Line
NJOYN is not a resume screener. It is an application platform — used by Canadian government agencies, Canadian Crown corporations, and CGI's operations on both sides of the border — with two scored components: your resume and your screening question responses. Most candidates treat only the resume as the application. The candidates who get to interviews treat the screening questions as the application and back them up with a well-matched resume.
The formatting advice is simple: write in plain text that survives stripping. The keyword advice is simple: use the posting's vocabulary, because that's the language the system is built to recognize. The screening question advice requires actual work — STAR-structured answers, specific results, and the same precision you would bring to an interview.
The platform rewards candidates who engage with it on its own terms.
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