When recruiters meet skilled immigrants

Stories from HR professionals on hiring, cultural differences, diversity and more

Thanks to Canada’s multicultural society, it seems that almost every HR practitioner has a story to tell when it comes to immigrants. Canadian HR Reporter spoke with a number of respondents to the Reality Check survey on skilled immigrants to gain insight into their experience.

Hiring seamstresses

Josie Cancilla, director of human resources for Stitch It, a Burlington, Ont.-based company with 589 employees across Canada and 25 in the United States, said skilled immigrants are critical for her organization, a retail chain that specializes in sewing and alterations.

“We definitely have a skill shortage because there are not too many people left here in Canada who will sew or enjoy sewing full time,” she said.

For the kind of talent she needs, large daily newspapers are almost useless in generating quality candidates. Instead she turns to local cultural newspapers. She got the idea one day while watching her mother, a former seamstress of Italian descent, reading an Italian newspaper that had job ads in it.

She put together a list of various cultural newspapers across the country and now Stitch It regularly advertises positions in Iraqi, Portuguese, Iranian, Italian, Mandarin and other cultural publications.

The company also uses multicultural radio stations, has worked with some immigrant service companies and recently signed a deal with Monster.ca to advertise positions. She said even though the workers she is targeting likely don’t visit the online job board, their children do and will pass along information about job openings to their parents — at least that’s what she’s hoping.

But the best source of applicants is employee referrals, she said. The company pays employees $50 for successful referrals if the new hire stays for at least three months.

It’s pretty easy to assess whether an applicant has the skills needed to do the work — a simple sewing test separates the wheat from the chaff. But there was one candidate whom she let in without doing the test.

“She came with a letter of reference. She was actually the Queen of Jordan’s personal seamstress,” said Cancilla. “So I was like, ‘Yah. I don’t think you need a sew test.’ Many of our applicants come very skilled. A lot of them owned bridal boutiques back home.”

English skills are critical because the workers are in a retail environment and deal directly with the customers. Skilled candidates with weak language skills are often paired up with someone who can speak English better and is of the same descent.

“So even if something has to be translated, they’re buddied and they can do that easily,” said Cancilla.

She’s run into a few cultural issues. For example, in China it’s not respectful for a worker to look a manager in the face, she said.

“They think that’s disrespectful whereas here if we’re speaking to you then we need eye-to-eye contact so there’s a lot of transitioning and teaching them that it’s okay,” she said. “You’re not being disrespectful to me. That’s our culture here.”

Serving a multicultural community

Susan Macdonald, HR co-ordinator for Marchese Health Care, an independent community-based health care provider in Hamilton, with 80 full- and part-time staff, said a multicultural staff is critical to serving the community it operates in.

Marchese Health Care serves patients in their homes who have just been released from hospital. Because the company is in a very multicultural part of Hamilton, it has to be able to provide services in a wide variety of languages.

“There are more than 15 languages on staff,” said Macdonald. “Croatian, Serbian, Russian. Our community is very diverse. You’ll be in the office and you’ll hear someone say, ‘We need someone Italian speaking to take line whatever.’ It’s nice that we’re able to provide that service.”

Red Deer’s approach

Grant Howell, the personnel manager for the City of Red Deer, Alta., said the issue of skilled immigrants isn’t that big of a deal for his own staffing needs — but the impact it is having on the city is tremendous.

Alberta’s employment boom has left some employers in Red Deer, a city of 80,000, scrambling for warm bodies.

“We have a major phone call centre that would like to be at 1,100, but they’re at 700 and they have work for 1,100,” said Howell. “People like that have hit the wall or are hitting the wall. You should see the local newspaper. Pages and pages of ads for workers.”

Red Deer also has a hog facility and more meat production facilities on the way.

“These employers are bringing in immigrants from Sudan, from El Salvador and that has some very dramatic impacts on a relatively small-sized community,” he said. “That’s where we get the dramatic impact.”

He said the City of Red Deer itself has enough staff for the immediate future, but said it’s only about seven years away from hitting the wall itself. They’re in the midst of developing a comprehensive long-term staffing strategy, but said the municipal government is still seen as a very desirable employer and its turnover is negligible.

The local government is seeing the stirrings of a shortage in certain hot skills it recruits for — accounting, financial management and electrical engineering to name a few — but Howell is confident Red Deer will be able to find the workers it needs moving forward.

The municipality is putting a lot of emphasis on developing its own talent because it’s difficult for a public sector employer to go out and compete with the private sector, he said.

“That’s because the citizens kind of resent it or these organizations resent government stealing their employees with their own money. So by policy we are not going to attract them by stealing from others,” he said. “We concentrate on doing is hiring talent and developing it and maintaining a strong organization culture.”

He said the most extreme example of a staffing shortage came during his time as an HR staffer with a big oil company in Fort McMurray, Alta.

“Tim Hortons had to close for three weeks because they couldn’t get staff a couple of years ago,” Howell said. “And that’s dramatic, because in McMurray, boy, they’re busy all the time.”

A stronger work ethic

Christine Anderson, manager of human resources at Eco-Tec Inc., a Pickering, Ont.-based manufacturer of industrial water purification, chemical recovery and recycling systems, said in her experience immigrants tend to have a stronger work ethic.

“They really want the job and they will work really, really hard to make the employer happy,” she said. “They really want to prove themselves.”

Celebrating diversity

Laura Ralph, HR manager for Canada for Smiths Detection, a company with Canadian offices in Toronto that offers advanced security solutions to detect and identify explosives, chemical and biological agents, weapons and contraband, has found a unique way to celebrate and promote diversity.

Every month, diversity calendars are attached to employees’ pay stubs.

“It’s impossible to list every single holiday and observation, but we try and highlight some of the high holy days of the religions,” she said. “For example, the recent end of Ramadan. The calendar explains the meaning behind the holiday and how it’s celebrated.”

She said the employees really like the calendar, and have learned a lot about other cultures and faiths from it.

An ‘arbitrary indignity’

Evert Akkerman, manager of human resources at Duca Financial Services Credit Union in Toronto, said immigrants come to Canada looking for opportunities they don’t have in their own countries.

“They come here to build a better future for their children. They have shown a willingness to uproot and start anew,” said Akkerman. “They are eager to prove to themselves and their families that they can find their niche and succeed in Canada. Especially in this area of globalization, being screened out for ‘lack of Canadian experience’ is an arbitrary indignity that no new Canadian in 2005 should have to endure.”

He said Duca considers skilled immigrants for employment on equal footing with qualified people that were born, raised and educated in Canada.

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