High job vacancy, the lowest unemployment rate in the country and rapid wage inflation are hallmarks of B.C.’s current tight labour market.
“For an economist, what’s going on in the labour market is absolutely fascinating right now,” said Ken Peacock, chief economist at the Business Council of British Columbia (BCBC).
The Bank of Canada’s latest business outlook survey found a third of Canadian firms are facing a binding labour shortage that restricts their ability to meet demand.
Many of those firms are from B.C. where unemployment sits at 5.2% as of June, and where job vacancy is highest in the country at 4%.
“Companies are having such difficulty and challenges hiring people that they can’t expand their operations. They’re muddling through with the existing workforce, and the job numbers just aren’t rising the way we had seen in previous years,” said Peacock.
It’s a seller’s market for talent, and for firms that help secure it.
“The war for talent is very real,” said Leslie Meingast, founder and board chairwoman of TPD, a full-service human resources firm, and the largest female-owned business in British Columbia.
“Smart companies are focusing on both attraction and retention. That drives our business.”
While the company’s employee base expands and contracts alongside shifts in the broader market, Meingast argues that TPD has been more impervious to market swings than other recruitment and HR services firms.
This year, TPD – which has six offices in Canada, one in the U.S. and its headquarters in Vancouver – expects to add 205 employees in B.C. for a total of 1,150 staff members. Meingast attributes the expansion in part to an engaged corporate culture, to what has been a strong Canadian economy and to the firm’s evolution over nearly 40 years.
“We have been dealing with this demographic shift we knew was coming for over 20 years,” said Meingast, who points out that a wave of baby boomer retirements is contributing to what she describes as an extremely strong Canadian job market.
It constitutes a major demographic shift, and one that brings some headaches: firms risk being caught without a succession plan, and marketing to the right people in the right places has become a critical driver of recruitment success.
On top of that, where technology can help provide solutions, access and expertise become barriers: some small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are bogged down in literal paperwork because they can’t afford an HR manager or the right software. Meingast also said more than half of job seekers won’t work for a company with a poor online reputation, even if they’re unemployed.
“There needs to be a rethink of business models themselves,” said Meingast, pointing to the possibilities of remote work as an example, though the rethink doesn’t stop there.
“There’s this disengagement of a whole sector of very, very brilliant people, and these would be women having children.”
In addition to TPD’s significant anticipated employee growth this year, Meingast highlighted a couple of in-demand services that are driving growth at the company: offering an in-sourced HR partner model where SMEs can access a professional human resources team at a much lower cost and offering in-sourced talent acquisition, again at a controlled cost.
Encouraging businesses to establish remote business models has also been a focus; TPD itself has benefited from an ability to remotely work with businesses.
“To explain our technology would be to give away some of our secret sauce and our magic,” mused Meingast, sharing that heavy investments in modernization and technology have allowed the firm to offer customized strategies to clients.
“We’ve turned the typical recruitment agency model on its head.”
