Calgary unemployment rate at 6.6%, job recruiters connected: report
Posted Mar 15, 2023 1:55 pm.
Last Updated Mar 15, 2023 1:56 pm.
A Calgary oil and tech worker says job recruiters are making things difficult for prospective workers, and recent research suggests the same thing.
Calgary’s unemployment rate currently sits at 6.6 per cent, according to StatsCan, and sits above Canada’s current unemployment average of five per cent.
According to the Calgary Real Estate Board, there were fewer full-time jobs in February than at the start of the year.
In addition, the board says full-time employment remains down by 27,000 jobs since August 2022.
Umer Waqar, who has been working in the oil and tech industry in Calgary for over 15 years, says most first-level recruiters don’t even know what they are looking for in candidates.
“They give out vague requirements, and then the recruiters who are not trained to understand and process them go out and do a search based on some keywords,” Waqar said.
“So they maybe get around 50 candidates, and then they blast out an email to schedule interviews without actually studying the CVs.”
Waqar, an executive deal lead at AT&T Global Business, says there have been “many instances” where he feels job recruiters have no clue about the job requirements they hire for.
“Once there was a recruiter who wasted so much of my time … his hiring managers [time], and I am sure [the time of] all the people involved in the process,” Waqar said.
“He was stuck at one keyword, which was probably not even relevant to what that real job requirement was. But he wouldn’t budge.”
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Meanwhile, Sara Mahabadi from the University of Alberta has research expertise in this area, and her latest study suggests there is an evolution from posting to hiring.
According to the report, it’s common for a job description to change between when it is posted and when someone is hired.
In some cases, this can lead to employees either leaving or being laid off, leading to higher unemployment rates.
“Such employees say, ‘Oh, they hired me for something else, and now they are expecting me to do something else. And so I’m disappointed and discouraged,'” Mahabadi told CityNews.
“What we saw in our data was that so many of these people exit ecosystems altogether. So this is not something that either of the parties — neither the manager nor the candidate — would want to happen. Why? Because they put a lot of time and effort in this process.”
Mahabadi and the study’s co-author, Lisa Cohen of McGill University, examined 51 startups in Canada and interviewed more than 100 employees, job seekers, founders, hiring managers, successful entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists.
It was published in Organization Science in February.
Read More: Economy adds 22,000 jobs in February, unemployment steady at 5%
Today’s hiring landscape — even among larger organizations — is seeing a lot of transformation, combining new jobs, and new skills, especially in the wake of COVID, according to Mahabadi.
She says the key to survival in this job market is being open to evolution.
“Both candidates and manager should understand and be conscious about the fact that these changes and evolution will happen, so in a way, be ready for it,” she said.
