Employer Engagement

Skills for Change is a pioneer in implementing the Collaborative Workforce Development model for supporting the employers with a high quality talent pipeline. We have evolved this model over years but the last couple of years have been instrumental as we collaborated with employers around Toronto, Peel and Hamilton regions to understand their take on the prevalent issue of “skills gap” that has created a vacuum for both job seekers and employers in the Canadian Labour Market, which escalated further during the pandemic.

During the requirement gathering activity, we interacted with over 140 employers, who highlighted some critical issues like newcomer underemployment, retention, ED&I biases as some of the factors leading to the gap.

As a response, we shifted focus of our employer engagement services such that collaborative workforce development for Skills for Change is now a two-pronged approach, the first aspect of it involves equipping the job seekers with skills development training and creating meaningful employment opportunities for them so that they could not only prepare themselves to get a job but also to perform it well and eventually get retained for a career progression.

On the other hand, it is also crucial to understand the skills requirement of employers and provide them access to a talent pipeline in advance so that they could collaborate in helping these talents nurture their employees in the near future. Access to this talent pipeline enables employers to implement best practices at their workplace and strengthen their work-culture to accommodate diverse talent, which eventually leads to high productivity and less churn.

We devised an account management model which focuses less on transactional relationships with our employers and more on their involvement in workforce development so that both job seekers and employers can have multiple touch-points which leads to a high-quality talent pipeline and higher retention.

With this model, not only the hiring and placement numbers have seen a qualitative rise but with increased touch-points, we are seeing more than 5 events every month including Speaker Series, Industry Work Insights Series, Sector-specific Recruitment Events, Mentoring and Networking Events.

On an average, we have reached out to 230+ employers every month, with over 82% conversion rate. One of our biggest achievements is that we receive a huge inbound lead traffic, 46% of the total lead/month, for expression of interest from employer partners to collaborate.

In the past year, we have also been able to help more than 40 organizations with financial incentives to offset their hiring, training and other operational costs so that they can grow and be a significant contributor to the labour market.

Number of Program Clients Served (2021-2022)

Employer Testimonials

“Our company was looking for new employees who were looking to change career paths and get experience in the trades. Skills for Change quickly paired us with potential candidates and assisted with training and safety related costs. They made the process quick and easy while providing valuable resources to our company”

Tim Spalding, Spalding Construction

“Skills for Change provided us the training that not only helped us achieve our goals but set us up for future success.” “Skills for Change has been very professional and reliable regarding their assistance with providing candidates. Oriole Landscaping is grateful that they reached out to us”.

Steve Peckford & Julie Poirier, Oriole Landscaping

Key Successes

In March 2020 as the world came to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers were forced to close their businesses and/or place a hold on hiring. Despite this major challenge, the Employer Engagement team was able to gain many big successes in 2020-2021.

The Employer Engagement program was re-designed on the website to have built more engaging content to attract new employers

The Employer Engagement team supported new projects such as the Immigrant Women Social Enterprise Project, placing 15 clients with employers and developing a new strategy to pitch the clients and facilitate interviews.

• TWFC

In August 2021, Skills for Change participated in a 6-week Toronto Workforce Funder Collaborative (TWFC) capacity building project, a project supporting organizations that are working together to solve a workforce development challenge in the GTA. WE had the opportunity to explore strategies are impactful in ensuring there is: • Workforce equity that ensures workers and job seekers have access to education and training leading to good jobs

• Good career pathways that lead to family sustaining wages and upward economic mobility • Employer engagement in program design and development that leads to stronger program models and increased employment opportunities

• Data that is informative, reliable, and useful and informs future workforce development programs and policies; and,

• Effective partnerships that focus on place-based solutions for the most pressing challenges.

We were able to create a capstone project at the end of the program that has supported the development of a long-term engagement strategy with employers, with a focus on retention.

Key Events

The Employer Engagement team held many successful recruitment fairs, information sessions and mentoring events.

We held mentoring events with Softchoice, PwC, CIBC; Information sessions held with FIIX Software, Apotex, FGF Brands, Muslim Moms of Canada, CPA Ontario, Amazon and Canadian Welding Bureau, with an average of 50 attendees per event and Recruitment Fairs held with Adecco, Apotex, as well as internal jobs fairs, promoting all available jobs.

HIGHLIGHT: City of Toronto Job Fair

In early January, the City of Toronto approached Skills for Change on a number of Clerical positions coming up with their Toronto Public Health Division focused on and working in the Covid immunization clinics. They requested Skills for Change to hold a large-scaled job fair to engage our clients and community with the various positions, with a focus on racialized persons and youth.

The job fair took place on Friday, January 15, 2021 and was a large collaborative effort of the Agency, with the leads as Employment Services and Employer Engagement staff, and engaged 36 SfC staff in conducting pre-screening, on site interviews and manage all the technical aspects of the event.

As a result, approximately 1800 registered for the event, and based on qualifying questions, 800 interviews were conducted; 70 registered through EO, 296 were put through to the City of Toronto and 50% of those invited in assessment/next step of hiring.

This year, the Employer Engagement team launched a new employer breakfast series to engage new employers in Skills for Change’s work.

Events

Recruitment Events

We held many exciting events in 2021-2022, including a bi-weekly recruitment event, where clients could learn more from the Employer Engagement team and hiring managers of the jobs available with Skills for Change and the recruitment process.

Work Insights

Work Insights by Skills for Change is a virtual series designed to give participants an insider's perspective on working in a specific sector or industry. Each session hosts selected panelists from a featured industry who share their professional experience and knowledge, as well as their views on emerging trends in their field.

Our Work Insights Series drew an engaging crowd of 300+ clients and prospective clients throughout the year. We held events with TD, Hyundai Canada, Tata Consultancy and Sunlife Financial.

Our Work Insights session with TD on Data Analytics can be found here.

Funders for the Program