Starting in May and continuing until next February, 14 Ontario colleges, including Ottawa’s Algonquin College and La Cité collégiale, will host free workshops to help small and medium-sized employers hire more internationally-trained immigrants.
The provincial Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration is providing $700,000 for 160 workshops to be held across Ontario, over the next two years.
The “Are You Ready?” workshops are co-ordinated by Connect Strategic Alliances, a non-profit organization that builds partnerships between Ontario’s colleges and business, industries and government.
The purpose of the workshops is to prepare employers for the impending worker shortage, so that when it does come, employers are already good at hiring and retaining skilled immigrants, says senior project manager Nikhat Rasheed.
“If you haven’t hit the talent shortage in your sector yet, you will shortly,” she says.
“You have to be prepared to take advantage of the talent source that comes from skilled immigrants,” she adds.
The workshops were piloted last month and hosted more than 100 employers.
The pilots in February were restricted to small- and medium-sized employers – those with fewer than 500 employees and less than $50 million in annual gross revenue.
The majority of Ontario businesses fall into this category. When the workshops start in May, 75 per cent of the spots will be reserved for small and medium-sized employers, but large employers will be able to attend as well.
A recent report by TD Bank suggests that seven million workers, or one third of the Canadian workforce, will retire over the next 20 years.
The report says employers will have to fill the gaps with immigrants, and other groups that have traditionally been under-represented in the workforce, including women and aboriginals.
Some of the greatest problems employers have in hiring skilled immigrants are simple things such as interview questions and job-descriptions, says Denyce Diakun, the workshop co-ordinator for Algonquin College.
Interviewers often use slang and idioms, such as “the sky is the limit,” “think outside the box” and “be a team-player,” says Diakun.
This sort of language may not make sense to someone whose first language is not English. She says these phrases are vague and often meaningless.
“We set people up to fail in that respect and we are not even aware that we’re doing that,” says Diakun.
It is a much better business practice to use precise, literal language, say Diakun and Rasheed.
“Once we hone in on what we really want to know with precise language, it eliminates a lot of the confusion that occurs during an interview process,” says Rasheed.
Julia Chapman, business development manager for the Individual Planning Group, an Ottawa mutual fund dealership, attended the pilot workshop at Algonquin College last month. She says it was a great opportunity to network with people in her field.
Though she has been training and recruiting financial advisors for more than 20 years, Chapman says she was not even aware that she herself was guilty of asking unclear questions during interviews.
“I’m going to be a lot more clear with my questions now, without using any slang,” she says.
“When you ask a question, you should be clear if you want to give a person a chance to respond properly.”
The “Are You Ready?” workshops will be free until February 2011, but after that, colleges will be allowed to charge a fee.