Conference Board of Canada Insights on Immigration
The Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Business Insights on Immigration recently released its report, Small Business, Big Impact: Immigrant Hiring and Integration in Five Canadian Cities. The Centre conducted interviews regarding labour market dynamics and immigrant hiring in Oshawa.
From all these interviews across five cities, the report highlights the following:
- Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in various sectors have identified skills gaps as their most common employment challenge. They seek employees who require minimal training and investment after being hired.
- SMEs use practical and inclusive strategies to evaluate newcomers’ education and experience, but they rarely intentionally reach out to newcomers or work with immigrant-serving agencies during recruitment and onboarding.
- Local-level connections between SMEs, SME-serving organizations, and immigrant-serving agencies need strengthening. SME-serving organizations have expressed a desire to be more intentional in sharing valuable resources and linking the businesses they collaborate with to immigrant-serving agencies. This will enhance SME experiences with immigration programs.
- Wherever possible, SMEs should implement flexible workplace policies to help accommodate diverse employee needs, such as adjusting working hours to align with transit and childcare schedules.
The Centre for Business Insights on Immigration is a research collective designed to strengthen employer engagement in immigration and effectively manage immigrant talent. The Centre leverages employer and sector engagement in research to improve immigration for immigrants and the corporate sector.
The Centre’s research agenda focuses on building an immigration system that benefits immigrants, businesses, and the Canadian economy.
To read the full report, follow this link