TORONTO – A new study shows that Canadian employers are willing to hire workers with no work-related experience due to a tight job market.
Research published today indicates that experience and education, once crucial to many positions, are becoming less and less important in the face of labor shortages.
The findings are based on an online survey of 1,000 employers across Canada conducted in May by Censuswide on behalf of Index, a job listing website.
The survey found that 77 per cent of Canadian employers see value in hiring a candidate based on their “soft” interpersonal skills and attitude towards learning rather than work-related knowledge and “hard” skills.
He also found that four out of five employers said their company would consider hiring applicants who did not hold any job-related qualifications or certification and would instead offer on-the-job training to new workers.
The survey suggests that employers are also willing to sacrifice the need for relevant experience in light of the challenges of finding candidates.
“We’re honestly facing one of the tightest job markets we’ve ever had,” said Michelle Slater, director of Index. “There is a clear shortage of manpower.”
Canada’s unemployment rate fell to 5.1 per cent in May, Statistics Canada reported earlier this month.
It is the lowest rate since at least 1976, dating back to comparable data.
The tightening of the labor market is being driven by a strong recovery from the pandemic and demographic changes.
“The aging population and the rapidly growing economy have made the available group of skilled workers quite low,” Slater said. “Entrepreneurs need to be much more creative.”
The Canadian employer survey was conducted to find out what employers are doing differently to cover some of the job gaps, he said.
The survey found that employers are increasingly willing to hire based on skills such as communication, adaptability and attention to detail, rather than so-called hard skills such as technical knowledge or training.
“Canadian employers are more concerned with what the person can bring to the team in terms of their attitudes compared to the skills they have that they are incorporating into the position,” Slater said.
The findings are positive not only for young people not going to school or starting their first job, but also for older workers who change careers, he said.
“It means that people who may not have such a difficult skill on their resume might still have a chance to get the job of their dreams.”
While labor shortages are affecting all industries, research has found the most difficult jobs to find candidates for digital and information technology skills, project management, engineering, software development and coding skills.
The professional body of the electoral industry, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says that online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly show the population.