A Community Approach to Recruitment: Take Two
About Recruiting in the Saint John Region
Achieving our community’s true potential means solving our talent recruitment challenges, through becoming more connected to one another and understanding short and long-term employer talent needs. We need to continue with this community approach to recruitment, refine what it could mean and work together to bring it to life. Through this model, we could be a leader in connecting the pieces of recruitment to drive economic prosperity.
There’s a clear appetite to solve the recruitment challenge, demonstrated by engagement from employers and public agencies. Our community is uniquely positioned to pull on this engagement, and our connections, to reach solutions to current and future recruitment challenges.
Recruiting key technical talent is an area of focus for our community, with over 150 job postings requiring these types of skills. Employers are actively seeking support and demonstrating a need to think about solving recruitment challenges like this, more holistically. In line with this approach, there’s a need to engage both traditional and non-traditional recruitment solutions.
Enterprise Saint John and Opportunities NB are actively working with employers to help them achieve their specific recruitment goals and reach our community’s job targets at the same time. Working together in this close-knit public/private sector partnership brings to light new opportunities and insights. It creates a new discussion. The conversation is more diverse than the usual internal company dialogue. Significantly, it solves both those company and community challenges simultaneously. The end result becomes a strong connection between public and private organizations that can be leveraged to influence longer-term solutions. University and Community College programming decisions, for example.
One of the challenges our community will face may be its own culture, stemmed in modesty. We need to reshape this tendency and demonstrate our confidence in what we have to offer. When it comes to large global companies our community’s tendency has been to err on the side of caution. After all, companies like this have robust support structures and corporate offices with all the answers, right? What could we possibly have to offer? Actually — a lot. We are the experts on what works in our unique community and we are nimble. We can offer solutions to some of these recruitment challenges that some of these large companies can’t because of our unique makeup and the ways we are connected.
For example, with IBM’s recent announcement of over 110 jobs in our community over the next three years, we are working together to attract talent. With diverse roles requiring specific technical expertise, we are presented with significant challenges. By working as a single, community recruitment team, IBM, Enterprise Saint John, Opportunities NB, Provincial Education Training and Labor, and other organizations have come together to explore all possible recruitment avenues.
One outcome was the delivery of an IBM Saint John Open House. The open house featured an opportunity to explore what it’s like to work with IBM, through conversations with current employees, tours of the office space and interviews. Over 300 potential candidates participated in the Open House. The talent is out there — we just need to work together to find it.
