HR North Project Manager Garvin Cole recently invited Northern Ontario employers to attend a one-hour web conference about addressing the region’s growing talent gap and was surprised by the overwhelming response.
“We usually get maybe five or ten employers register to attend a typical web conference,” he says.
“But for this one we got 60…Sixty! And some were from Toronto! I have known for some time that Northern Ontario employers are having an increasingly difficult time finding professional talent to fill job openings, but I didn’t realize the problem is as severe as the web conference proved.”
HR North (www.hrnorth.ca) and Skills International (www.skillsinternational.com), Canadian-founded global talent and career management firms, jointly sponsored the web conference. In the wake of its success, the two organizations are forming an alliance to help employers quickly and easily hire foreign-qualified professionals under Canada’s new Express Entry immigration law when no Canadians can be found to fill open positions.
Cole says there’s far more at stake than just filling job openings. “Make no mistake…this new alliance could help save our region’s economy,” he says. “Unless we begin bringing in skilled professionals and their families from other countries under Express Entry, in 20 years we may see entire communities decline or disappear as businesses either close down or leave.”
According to Cole, a unique “three-headed monster” is causing the growing talent gap problem in Northern Ontario. “One, over the next 15 years nearly 147,000 workers, or 47.7 per cent of the total workforce, will retire,” he says. “Two, more of our homegrown college graduates are leaving the region for larger cities. Three, as a result, the remaining talent pool is becoming less and less qualified to fill open positions. It all adds up to a big red flag warning for our future economy.”
Skills International was originally founded in 2006 to help connect immigrants who landed in Canada without jobs to Canadian employers. In 2013, CEO Rohail Khan started a for-profit unit to help professionals living in their home countries start new careers in Canada under Express Entry, which launched 1 January 2015.
