The Career Foundation

Developing Human Potential

employment services

The Career Foundation Launches Its Online Workforce Development Centre

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The Career Foundation's Online Workforce Development Centre: Creating opportunities to build prosperity for all!

With a successful history of operating and delivering sector-focused workforce development projects, The Career Foundation is pleased to share a new innovation to our service model. We are excited to announce the launch of The Career Foundation’s Online Workforce Development Centre!

This centre is currently an online platform that highlights sector-specific initiatives that we are continuously developing. We invite employers to partner with us in a new way: to design sector-based workforce innovations that will continuously respond to changing industry needs and create new opportunities for employers and job seekers, while rebuilding the Canadian economy.

Faced with unprecedented disruption, we are dealing with great uncertainty. While some employers were experiencing losses before COVID-19, they now need to hire extensively. On the other hand, employers who were poised to scale-up their businesses have unfortunately had to lay off many employees. This Workforce Development Centre is needed now, more than ever, to help make sense of our disrupted labour market. It will help to explore, design, and test agile workforce strategies to meet the quickly evolving needs of employers. Finally, the centre will create opportunities for all job seekers.

As we begin, our Workforce Development Centre will focus on three priorities:

Online Workforce Development Centre: The Career Foundation will focus on three primary strategies as we continuously build our platform: Inform, Collaborate, and Co-Create.

The Workforce Development Centre will monitor trends emerging in various industries. We will work closely with employers to co-create solutions that will help them meet the evolving needs of their sector. These solutions will also help employers access diverse, traditionally untapped talent pools.

We invite you to view the additions to our website here, and to check out our new Future@Work podcast.

More on the Workforce Development Centre

The Career Foundation identified the top six industries that are currently experiencing high growth, skills mismatches and/or talent shortages. Those include technology, finance, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, sales & service, and the skilled trades. Our in-house Sector Experts (Employer Services Consultants) have worked closely with hundreds of employers in these six sectors.

The long-term goal of the Workforce Development Centre is to become a trusted source of industry intelligence, sector-based partnerships, and workforce innovations that support labour market and economic resiliency.

We look forward to working with you to advance the priorities of the Workforce Development Centre — creating opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.

Online Workforce Development Centre URL:
https://careerfoundation.com/workforce-development-centre

Accessing the Hidden Job Market: Step 1 (Building a Personalized Employer Database)

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Hidden Job Market: A person using their laptop to search for jobs online.

There is no definitive statistic, but the vast majority (more than 70%!) of available positions in the job market are not advertised. This means that if your heart is set on a particular industry or employer, you’re probably going to have to start searching beyond wanted ads, job boards, and employment search engines like Monster, Indeed, and Job Bank. Fear not—it isn’t as difficult to connect with employers as it seems. To start, you should understand how to access the hidden job market, why employers don’t post their jobs, and what ‘hidden’ jobs really are.

Begin by Finding Relevant Employers Using Canada 411

This site is nothing more than an online telephone book; it’s an employment lead goldmine! You can use it to find businesses in your field to contact about a job. Under the business section on the right of the page, you’ll see two sections to fill out: ‘What?’ and ‘Where?’

What? will require you to choose the industry you’re looking for work in. The key is to be broad. For example, if you want to search for Sushi Chef positions, type “sushi” not “sushi chef” or “sushi restaurants.” This way, you’ll get as many employer results as possible, some of which you may never have considered before (and if you haven’t thought of it already, other job seekers likely haven’t as well). If you’re searching for a more general job such as administrative assistant, you should begin searching for industries in which you already have either a professional or social connection. If you’re an administrative assistant with insurance experience, start with the insurance industry.

Where? will only require you to choose the city you want to work in. Just remember to vary your city names. A business in Toronto may use North York or Etobicoke as its listed address and vice-versa. Also keep in mind that a commute is a part of living in the Greater Toronto Area. If you aren’t willing to travel, you’ll have to accept that you’ve just limited your employment options. Tunnel vision is a detriment to job searching!

Create an Orderly & Categorized List of Each Employer Contact

Using Canada 411 will help you find hundreds, and sometimes thousands of employers, so it’s natural to feel overwhelmed. Start by bookmarking the pages of each employer you want to contact (or at least research) in folders on your computer. Or you can input the links in a spreadsheet. Group them by (a) industry and (b) personal importance. If any of them actually have job openings posted, you can also group or list them based on how much time you have to apply before the deadline. This helps you sort out which businesses you absolutely must apply to and which ones you may be less sure of. Don’t limit yourself, and make sure to spend more time tailoring an application to a business you might consider to be a ‘dream job.’

Canada 411 will give you the contact information (telephone, mailing address, fax, and website) for each business. If they’re hiring but haven’t posted a position on a major job search website, you’ll have an advantage. Go directly to their website—if they’re hiring, apply, and if they’re aren’t, you can still study their business and apply with a tailored application either online, in person, or via cold call! This cuts out the middle-persons and limits the competition. If none of the above works out, you can create a schedule for follow-ups to check if businesses are hiring at a later date.

Informally Network & Learn from the Labour Markets You’re Pursuing

At this point, you’ve created a Personalized Employer Database from which to prospect employment opportunities. If you’re really intent on landing that dream job, keep an eye out for any key terms, professional associations or groups, and overall industry trends in the labour markets you are pursuing. Consider this your sixth sense: your understanding of the key terms used in the industry, and more importantly, the terms that are most relevant to mention in a cover letter, résumé, or interview. Whether you’re a recent grad or a veteran of your field, knowing what employers currently expect is key. Professional associations often hold events where you can network and possibly learn about available, unlisted jobs.

When an employer withholds from posting an available position, it’s likely because they don’t want the burden of being hassled in the extreme. I’ve experienced firsthand what it means to facilitate a hiring event, and it’s not pretty. For weeks before and sometimes even months after an event, employers can continue to receive correspondence, a good portion of which is irrelevant to the position that was advertised.

Hidden Job Market - A diagram explaining how people search for jobs versus how employers prefer to hire.

The old pre-digital system was comforting for employers because it was much more time-consuming to physically type out a cover letter and résumé and mail it than it was to attach a Word document and hit ‘send.’ It acted as a moderate barrier, keeping out those who were not really serious about the position. The ease of emailing a résumé has multiplied the ‘waste’ that businesses receive. As such, employers are more likely to post positions on their websites or job boards specific to their industry networks and target market.

In the end…

This is NOT to say you’re hassling an employer if you prospect them correctly. If you’re scared of annoying an employer, don’t be—you might just be doing them a huge favour. You’ve saved them the time, cost and effort of posting their position. Just be sure to prospect with a simple straight-forward email and/or phone call with a tailored résumé to boot! It’s a numbers game, and if you do it correctly, you’re ultimately the one you’re doing the favour for.

Written by Jason D. Smith, Employment Consultant and Circumlocution Guru

Jason Douglas Smith is an Employment Consultant who works with ODSP recipients in the GTA and a former Employment Specialist with The Career Foundation. When not working to ensure (among many other things) that each one of his clients are in-the-know, this self-professed Futurist can often be found reading, writing, cycling, and cheering on his beloved Hamilton Tiger-Cats in his native Burlington.

A Short Collection of the Silliest Career Moves I’ve Seen in the Last 15 Minutes (as Told by an Employment Specialist)

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Silliest Career Moves - Coffee spills from a mug that's been tipped over. Work papers, magazines and other paraphernalia are shown stained with coffee.

Of all the social service capacities, “Employment Services” feel like the mid-point where people from every walk of life and experience come together for a common purpose. As an Employment Specialist, I’m involved in assisting clients through a myriad of career-related options to enhance and develop their overall potential. This includes self-marketing activities like résumé and cover letter writing, to methods one can use to access the Hidden Job Market, as well as skills enhancement through retraining programs (e.g., Second Career). It affords me the privilege of meeting many fantastic people with as many far-ranging experiences. It also affords me a firsthand look at the disastrous – if sometimes comical – mistakes many job seekers make.

The following list, through tears of merriment and exasperation, was jotted down over a single 15-minute period as I assisted my colleagues in reviewing applications for a Hospitality Hiring Event.

Failure to read the job posting and/or tailor your application to it

For one, the hospitality sector is unrelated to hospitals and mechanical engineering. A strong job search requires the job seeker to read the details of a posting and tailor their application as closely as possible. Moreover, hospitals are very competitive work environments to enter. If your goal is to work in a hospital, one needs to know what hospitals generally expect. If you can’t see the difference between ‘hospitality’ and ‘hospital,’ you are wasting more than just your own time.

The same applies to engineering. Even if you’re an engineer looking to change career paths, a mechanical engineering résumé will not assist you in applying for work in hotels, restaurants, or tourism. For this, you need to craft a skills-based résumé to show that you have the transferrable skills to enter an industry in which you have little to no experience.

Refusal to consider logistics

A “willingness to relocate” is an attribute many employers will appreciate. However, the Hospitality Hiring Event I’m referencing was set to take place in less than a week’s time. If an event is taking place in Toronto and you live in Calgary, a conservative estimate puts the drive to Toronto at 33 continuous hours across 3,419 kilometres (and that’s with taking a route that crosses the American border). It’s certainly a much shorter flight, but is it really worth it – especially if you don’t end up getting a job offer?

For those applying outside of Canada, you need to factor in the visa requirements of working in Canada if you are neither a citizen nor a permanent resident. Has this been factored in, along with the cost of a flight, accommodations, food, and the duration of your travel? Unless plans to relocate are directly addressed in an applicant’s cover letter, the employer will likely assume that out-of-area applicants don’t actually know or understand what they’re applying for.

Questioning employer antics (or simply being rude)

We’ve probably all had that dream where we’re at school giving a speech or taking an exam on a subject that we know nothing about. It’s terrifying. However, with regards to job search the best advice is quite simple: if you don’t know why someone is calling you, play it safe and remain polite at all times. It’s fine to ask polite, proactive questions as needed. I was taken aback at the number of applicants I called who became hostile because I was calling them at school, at work, or while they were sleeping (it was around 10:30 a.m., for the record). This anger seemed exacerbated by those applicants who also had no idea why I was calling them, despite my simple straightforward introduction.

Hostility within a job search is wrong at every level! It’s not the employer’s responsibility to keep a record of your job search – that’s your responsibility. The world is small, and burning bridges anywhere is ill-advised. Remain courteous at all times and keep a list of all your applications, including the employer’s name and address, the position applied for, and the date of your submission.

Using the wrong name and/or wrong phone number on your résumé

Just don’t do that. Use your name on your résumé. If you have more than one name, you should make life easier for the employer (and you) by using the same name on your résumé and in your email address. The same philosophy applies for your phone number. This includes having a clear voicemail message with your name in it and no one else’s. Many companies, banks in particular, have strict privacy policies regarding messages left on voicemail that do not clearly state who the recipient is. A simple, clear, and friendly message with your name is the best policy for job seekers. This is a simple yet highly important rule to follow.

Lack of attention to detail, practicality, courtesy, and common sense seem to be an Achilles’ Heel for more than a few job seekers! However funny these mistakes seem, they are really and truly only fun to giggle at when you are employed. So take a breather, adapt to the best practices, and brightly move forward! You’ve got this (We hope…)!

Jason Douglas Smith is a Training Application Coordinator with The Career Foundation, and has successfully directed clients in not only developing personalized job search strategy plans, but in circumnavigating the rigorous demands of applications for provincially-funded retraining. When not working, this self-professed Futurist can often be found reading, writing and barbecuing in his native Burlington.