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An employer engagement strategy that will change your life
Editorial by Christian Saint Cyr
National Director / Canadian Job Development Network
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Referring job seekers with barriers to employment to posted jobs is demoralizing and self-defeating. Employers may hire based on personality and fit, but they choose who to interview based on experience, education, qualifications and consistency; four factors multi-barriered job seekers often struggles to match.
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Applying for posted jobs, just reinforces a person's sense of worthlessness and erodes their confidence. Any outside adviser would say this isn't working but there is another pathway.
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In today's editorial, I'll share a strategy you can start employing today that will radically change how you do job development and will produce significantly improved results.
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Ideally, candidates should be applying for jobs that haven't yet been posted. We want our clients to be the only person the employer is considering. We want to eliminate competition and allow our clients to sell themselves on four different criteria; personal fit, transferable skills, applicable experience and long-term potential.
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I'm sure your thinking, of course I want to connect my clients with those jobs, but the only information I have on hiring-intent is job postings. This is not true. Lots of employers are thinking about hiring but haven't yet posted the job.
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Remember the 80 per cent of employers who hire through the hidden job market? A large portion of those start seeking out a candidate without posting the position.
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According to last week's Job Vacancies Report from Statistics Canada, there are 486,000 unfilled jobs across the country. Only a portion of those jobs have been posted.
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According to a 2024 survey conducted by the human resources consulting firm Mercer, the average turnover rate in Canada is 11.9 per cent annually; meaning one in ten employees changes over every year.
At 25.9 per cent, the retail and wholesale industries have the highest turnover rate.
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If I contact 10 employers, there is a good chance that at least one of them will have a role they need to recruit for but haven't yet posted the job.
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Let's talk about why the posted job is a deal-breaker for our clients or students.
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We can't all get into the mindset of an employer but we are all consumers.
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Let's say you are looking to buy a used car. You have a friend who is selling their car and it is sort of what you are looking for. Maybe it's not the right colour, there are too many kilometers and it doesn't have Apple CarPlay but you can always use Bluetooth.
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Your friend is promising you a great deal, but let's be honest, if they could sell it online for more money, would they have reached out to you in the first place?
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But, you like your friend and they kept their car clean and well maintained. At least you know the history of the car so you make the deal.
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This happens every day! Personally, I don't understand it, I'd rather choose from the 100 million cars that are out there and negotiate my own deal. Plus, I don't want to hate my friend when the transmission gives out two months later.
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Why do people do this? Because they're looking for an easy pathway forward. They don't want to visit a half dozen car dealerships, get harassed by salespeople, need to understand whether tire protection is necessary or what a document fee is. They would rather shake their friends hand and avoid all of these hassles.
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Employers feel this way about hiring. This is why employers want to use AI and applicant tracking software to hire candidates. Let technology do the hard work.
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When you hire someone, you need to post the position; gather resumes; get harassed on LinkedIn; sort the resumes; schedule the interviews; schedule second interviews; conduct reference checks; and make a job offer.
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According to Indeed, it takes approximately 50 to 100 person-hours to hire someone, with the average being around 50+ hours for a single role. That's more than an entire week of my year and if I need to hire for three or four positions throughout the year, that's nearly a month of lost productivity.
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It's no wonder so many employers turn to the hidden job market.
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This said, once an employer has committed to posting the job, they're going to follow-through with it. Much like the person that rejects their friend's offer to sell them their car, they now want to see all of the candidates; search for the best, most consistent Canadian experience; evaluate where they've worked, their credentials and qualifications to determine the very best people to interview.
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What we're talking about here is that brief period between forming intent, the intent to hire someone, and acting on it.
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We need to reorient our clients away from job postings to cold calling and reaching out to employers who haven't posted a job. There will be a lot of employers who say, we're not hiring right now, we've recently laid some people off, or we just hired someone, but statistics suggest if they contact 10 employers, at least one will have a recent job opening or they're planning on placing a job ad.
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For anyone who has a barrier to employment, this is an ideal place to be. They're not being evaluated among a cohort of applicants with more experience, Canadian education or a more consistent employment. It allows a 'go-getter'; someone who's prepared to cold-call an employer, an opportunity to make their case for being hired.
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This extends to those of us in job development as well. When we approach an employer who's already posted a position, we're trying to argue for our clients while simultaneously their email is pinging with an array of highly qualified candidates.
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No doubt you're wondering, where is the 'strategy' in all of this. Yes, I'm telling you and your clients to cold call employers but there is a secret sauce to this approach: 'NOC Codes'.
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I'm going to encourage you to build your entire job development strategy around NOC Codes.
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Here is a challenge for 2026. During the next 12 months, go out into your community and build or build on your existing database of employers. For each employer, gather all of the basic contact information but also a list all of the NOC codes they employ people in. For instance, if you're dealing with a restaurant; you'll want to include: 60030, Food Service Managers; 62020, Food Service Supervisors; 64300, Hosts/Hostesses; 65201, Food Counter Attendants / Kitchen Helpers; 75201, Deliver Service Drivers; 63200, Cooks; and 62200, Chefs. If you were doing a profile for a dental office, you would want to include: dentists, dental hygienists, dental assistants, and administrators.
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Each time you meet a new employer, ask them what jobs they typically employ people in rather than what jobs they're looking for people in right now.
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As the year goes by, you'll be creating a larger and larger database of employers, which is evergreen, rather than jobs, which are available for a limited time. If you want local labour market information, this is going to be an unparalleled resource no one else in town has.
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For restaurants, dental offices and car lots, the jobs might be obvious, but as you go you'll start encountering many employers that employ people in a very long list of occupations such as school districts, hospitals, hotels, manufacturing facilities and municipal government. Many of these jobs are going to be ones you don't expect.
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It's very easy to fall into traditional ways of looking at employers. For instance, if we need to find a job for an accountant, we think about about an accounting firm or for a landscaper, a landscaping company. Accountants and landscapers work in every single industry. Hotels, manufacturers and technology companies need both of these occupations, even though their core work isn't even close to the occupation category.
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On your own, or as part of your team, putting together this database will be the most powerful thing you can do to support your work in job development. Moving forward, each time you meet with a new client, you can print out a list of local employers that hire people in the work they do and help them develop a strategy to cold call them.
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It's for this reason, each time you work with a new client or student, you should have a list of the NOC Codes for which they are looking for work. This will allow you to easily pull a list of potential applicants for an employer when they specifically request someone in a particular job.
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And for those of you who think this approach is too radical, while I'm taking a strong stance, by no means do I think you should abandon job postings. To paraphrase Richard N. Bolles, author of 'What Colour Is Your Parachute?', if there are 14 ways to look for a job and the 14th way is to look at 'posted' jobs, still look at posted jobs. We just need to ensure our clients aren't only looking at posted jobs.
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If applying to dozens if not hundreds of posted positions and not getting a single job interview is demoralizing, how much more so is it for the job developer who has dozens of clients experiencing this again and again.
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Let the NOC Code unburden you from the job posting. Focus the dialogue around the employers' organization, their goals and objectives. Seek this opportunity to help coach your students or clients to do the very best job they can of marketing themselves. This is the surest way of sidestepping relentless competition and disappointment.
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We’ll be discussing the benefits of a NOC Code focused employer engagement strategy at our #MotivatingMondays meeting of the Canadian Job Development Network, Monday November 1st at 8:30am Pacific; 9:30am Mountain; 10:30am Central; 11:30am Eastern; 12:30pm Atlantic and at 1pm in Newfoundland.
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On the morning of Monday December 1st 'Click this Link' to join the session LIVE.
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'Filling My Public Speaking Engagements for 2025'
35% Discount Until December 18th
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Each year I get the privilege of speaking and doing dozens of professional development sessions for career development organizations; employers; industry associations; government; clients and students. In these roles, I'm able to speak and provide comprehensive training in labour market information; job development; effective recruitment and retention. I'm currently booking sessions for 2026 and every organization that books a session for next year by December 18th, will benefit from a 35% discount.
To learn more, email Christian Saint Cyr, at: csaintcyr@labourmarketonline.com.
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