For local recruiters, finding the right person for the job goes well beyond job qualifications.
“Recruiting is like matchmaking,” Odgers Berndtson Vancouver managing partner Ken Werker told Business in Vancouver in a recent interview. “Not only are you matching skills and culture, but you’re matching the individual’s lifestyle.”
As part of that, recruiters look to recreate an out-of-province candidate’s current lifestyle in the Metro Vancouver area – often matching them with cheaper suburban real estate options, rather than the headline-generating housing in hot real estate markets like Vancouver’s Westside.
West Pacific Consulting Group founder and president Feras Elkhalil told BIV how the company would pitch a candidate living in a Toronto suburb on an equivalent Vancouver-area lifestyle.
“If currently you live in Toronto and you live about 45 minutes out of the [Central Business District], OK, well, we have a place for you like that: it’s called Coquitlam,” he said.
“It’s got some great mountains and it’s got some great views to the water if you want to go into Port Moody. ”
See next week’s edition of BIV for what’s increasingly undermining local recruiters’ attempts to snag key out-of-town talent.
Jenny Wagler
Twitter @JennyWagler_BIV