Hiring immigrants makes good business sense

Economic forces are pushing skilled immigrants to the forefront of recruiting efforts

Hiring newcomers to Canada is good business, say several leading Canadian companies that employ large numbers of skilled immigrants. And they don’t need hard numbers to tell them so.

“We see immigrant labour as a vital source for us,” says Norm Hemfelt, vice-president of HR and administration for SNC Lavalin, a global engineering giant based in Montreal. “We haven’t needed to support that with any real metrics because we couldn’t do the kind of work we do globally nowadays without them. It’s as simple as that.”

Hemfelt and others like him are quick to point out the economic forces pushing skilled immigrant labour to the forefront: the Canadian-born workforce is shrinking while the demand for labour is growing; skilled immigrants are a new source of scarce technical and business expertise; immigrants within a workforce can help businesses better understand the needs of Canada’s burgeoning ethnic markets; and multi-lingual staff can help Canadian companies do more business with the rest of the world.

Consequently, more than a few Canadian companies are making immigrants a hiring priority.

“We are one of only about 12 companies that compete in injection mouldings in the world marketplace and few people had the kind of experience we were looking for,” says Logie Bruce-Lockhart, recruitment manager for engineering at Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. in Bolton, Ont. “So we did a review of our recruitment process back in 2002. And, as a result, instead of screening people out for their lack of Canadian experience, we began screening people in for their qualifications and skills, no matter where they’d gained their experience.”

This involved creating a matrix of where its top performers were coming from, and identifying a list of desirable educational institutions around the world.

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is practising similar diversity in its hiring and promotion practices. With visible minorities and new Canadians making up 15 per cent of its 11 million Canadian clients, “we expect much of our future growth will come from those markets,” says Ruchi Ganju, the program manager for diversity recruitment initiatives at RBC.

While none of these firms have made direct calculations when it comes to return on immigrant investment, they point to some important numbers and results.

“We’ve long had more jobs than we had people for,” says SNC’s Hemfelt. “So we’ve worked with agencies like the YMCA that are getting immigrants job-ready. Almost all of the last 18 hires we’ve made, for example, have been immigrants. And we are quite proud of that fact that our management and senior technical staff are now much more diverse.”

Bruce-Lockhart at Husky reports that thanks to their “screening-in” process, 40 per cent of their development engineers employed in Canada have at least one foreign degree.

At RBC, Ganju admits there’s no formal return-on-investment analysis done on the immigrants she helps hire and promote, but says Royal Bank shares have been rising steadily ever since RBC began recruiting an ethnically diverse staff.

“We have a system that allows us to analyse the diversity of our employee base at all levels,” says Ganju. “So right from the entry to the executive levels we can compare the numbers of who we have working for us with the available external workforce. And each of our business units can run report cards on their own performance with respect to hiring, promotions and terminations of staff that represent that diversity.” That measurement, made every few weeks, drives accountability throughout the 69,000-person RBC, she says.

While SNC, Husky and RBC have no pressing requirement to measure the return, at least one business association has felt the need.

“A few years ago we did produce a guidebook demonstrating the business case for hiring internationally trained workers,” says Ian Howcroft, vice-president of the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CME). “We saw that on the one hand you had companies saying we can’t find the highly skilled people we need, and yet on the other hand you had people with those skills driving taxis.”

As a result, the CME has focused its efforts on highlighting the success companies such as SNC, Husky and RBC enjoy as a result of their enlightened hiring policies.

But no such consciousness-raising is needed at ATI Technologies in Markham, Ont. Started by an immigrant in his garage, ATI has grown into a major tech firm with 3,800 employees around the world.

“We compete worldwide for world class talent,” says ATI’s Michel Cadieux, senior vice-president of corporate services. “So hiring skilled immigrants that are already here is critical to our strategy for growth. And for that, you don’t need any more of a business case.”

Andy Shaw is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

To read the full story, login below.

Not a subscriber?

Start your subscription today!