International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
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one informational barrier has been identified as an important factor: foreign-born
workers often have difficulties learning about job opportunities in their field due
to a lack of personal contacts. This section is devoted to identifying informational
barriers to the labour market integration of immigrants and exploring which of them
have yet to be addressed by the programmes discussed in the previous section.
3.1. Information barriers faced by employers
The majority of barriers to recruiting and hiring immigrants faced by employers are
not informational in nature. However, domestic recruiting of immigrants already
in Canada does suffer from a few key informational challenges. First, employers
often find it very difficult to know whether or not internationally trained workers
are qualified for the positions they would like to have filled. In some cases, this is
a credential issue: foreign credentials, education, and work experience receive less
recognition because employers in Canada are not certain that they are equivalent to
Canadian credentials. Secondly, many businesses are unaware of the opportunities
to recruit immigrants or temporary workers, and do not consider them in their
recruitment strategy. That is an awareness issue, which is relatively simple in
comparison to the other problems discussed, though changing the recruitment
strategies of many businesses across the country will be a gradual process given
that it is costly for businesses to do so. Third and lastly, some SMEs have been
surprised by the length of the immigration and hiring process when recruiting
immigrants and temporary workers from outside of Canada, a critical problem for
SMEs operating on a contract or project basis while trying to fill labour shortages.
Bureaucratic delays can translate into lost income for those businesses (Mah, 2012;
Kukushkin and Watt, 2009).
Domestic recruiting
The first two issues pertain particularly to the recruiting of immigrants already
residing in Canada, though they remain relevant in the case of potential immigrants
or temporary workers not already in Canada. In regards to screening for qualified
applicants, while many avenues of connecting with qualified and even pre-screened
immigrants exist and have been discussed in previous sections, the resources are
diffuse and decentralized. This service is normally provided to businesses by a local
or provincial SPO or industry association, so there are many such examples across
Canada. The combination of local employment councils, organizations such as
ALLIES and Skills International, industry associations, immigration consultants,
and government job banks has many SMEs requesting a single point of contact for
recruitment support services and to screen pre-qualified immigrants (Mah, 2012).
Businesses have also expressed criticisms of programmes that provide job search
support services directly to immigrants, for fear that adverse selection will lead
employment agencies to promote unqualified applicants, but an employer-led search
support system would solve that problem. This concern has been raised in several
consultations and multi-stakeholder surveys (Mah, 2012). A previous study by