To take a job in Vancouver, Calgary-based senior information management consultant Joey Roa would have to give up living in a 3,000-square-foot house just outside the downtown core. He’d have to give up his 20-minute on-foot commute for what he figures would be “a considerable drive, at best.” He’d have to start paying provincial tax. He’d see his current $1.15-per-litre gas prices rise to what he terms Vancouver’s “insane” pump prices.
And with Vancouver’s salaries failing to keep pace with Calgary’s oil-rich pay scale, he’d likely be looking at a pay cut to boot.
“When you look at all the additional expenses that are not necessarily offset by the compensation, it’s a tough sell,” said Roa, who turns down hopeful Vancouver headhunters several times a year.
“Once you get to salary expectations that usually concludes the call.”
By Roa’s calculation, he’d need a salary increase in the 20% to 25% range just to maintain an at-par lifestyle in Vancouver.
He’s not alone.
As Greater Vancouver’s housing prices continue to climb and salary levels fail to keep pace, local recruiters and headhunters are having an increasingly hard time attracting key out-of-province talent.
“It’s never been great in the last while,” said Ken Werker, Vancouver managing partner with executive search company Odgers Berndtson, “but it’s getting worse as the Vancouver [housing] market gets healthier.”
Werker said that with Vancouver’s housing prices “a little intimidating” even for well-paid executives, headhunting from Canada’s more affordable cities is getting harder.
“We still find that we can recruit from Toronto,” he said. “We can recruit from Alberta with some care. But Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Atlantic provinces are very difficult to recruit from.”
Western Management Consultants director Paul Gibbons also stated that Vancouver’s talent-attraction problem is growing as the city’s affordability decreases.
He noted that in the company’s executive recruitment practice, real estate questions get raised “right out of the gate” to eliminate uninterested candidates.
“We would mention, ‘By the way, the cost of a house in Vancouver is about 50 times the cost of a house in Manitoba, how do you feel about that?’”
Both Werker and Gibbons identified public-sector jobs in government, health care and academia as arenas where Vancouver is losing the talent war.
“In salaries, we have fallen behind American jurisdictions, British jurisdictions, our colleagues in Alberta and Ontario,” Werker said.
“Combine that with the high cost of housing in Vancouver and it compounds the problem.”
Gibbons added that the public sector’s prescriptive requirements limit candidate options, which are then reduced further by the sector’s lack of flexibility to raise compensation for the right candidate.
“If it’s a university professor or it’s a CIO or something for the City of Vancouver, they can’t double a pay package,” he said. “They can’t increase a pay package by $50,000 or $100,000 because it throws their internal equity off to smithereenies.”
Paul Mochrie, general manager of human resources for the City of Vancouver, said housing prices have not yet posed a problem for the city’s efforts to attract talent.
“[But] if the cost of living differential continues to increase, that could become a problem.”
Vancouver’s affordability problems are adding to the talent-attraction woes of local technology companies, some of which must compete for engineering talent with the deeper pockets of B.C.’s mining industry and Alberta’s oil and gas industry.
“It’s a bit of a perfect storm,” said Maryann Boychuk, a partner with Go Recruiting, which recruits for intermediate and higher positions in the technology, clean-tech and education sectors.
Boychuk said with the local engineer shortage, local recruiters are having to pitch candidates in Alberta, where salaries can be 20% higher and housing prices are “considerably more affordable” than Vancouver’s.
Raymond To, Go Recruiting’s founder and managing partner, noted that the company has seen two or three client companies with positions going unfilled for “a long time” – six months, sometimes.
“That will impact the company’s productivity, product development, revenue,” he said. “It’s pretty close to the bottom line if they don’t find the person.”
As Vancouver’s affordability problems increase, companies and recruiters are resorting to their full bag of tricks to attract talent.
Feras Elkhalil is founder and president of West Pacific Consulting Group (WPCG), which recruits for intermediate and higher positions for government agencies, health care, finance software, technology and mining.
He noted that beyond pitching candidates on the recreational and lifestyle opportunities in a city of mountains and ocean, as well as weather that never involves “10 feet of snow,” WPCG advises client companies to enable candidates to capitalize on that lifestyle.
“We advise our clients to give them more flexible hours at work to let them experience the big assets of Vancouver – give them maybe a flex day here and there so they can go biking in Stanley Park.”
At the executive-search level, Werker and Gibbons note that companies are increasingly offering incentives such as signing bonuses and no-interest or low-interest loans to help with housing equalization.
But Gibbons noted that lifestyle remains a key part of the pitch to candidates – and that where individuals don’t value that aspect, that Vancouver job pitch can fall flat.
“If somebody says, ‘Paul, I don’t really care about the ocean and the mountains, and if it’s minus-50 all year round that’s fine for me,’ there’s no lifestyle point to be made there.”
Yet Gibbons noted that while Vancouver recruiters and companies struggle to attract talent against a backdrop of rising housing prices, it isn’t the only Canadian city struggling to attract talent.
“A Regina company is going to have a very different challenge – it’s not going to be housing prices but it’s going to be weather, isolation and lifestyle,” he said.
“There might be recruiters in Regina saying ‘Man, if I was a recruiter in Vancouver: easy street. Who wouldn’t want to go and work and live there?’”
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