We want to help you hire newcomers who will help grow and enhance your business. Immigrants arriving in Canada bring with them a broad range of skills, which is why we work so hard to support immigrants to reach their full potential!
Building a diverse workforce is good for business as it connects your company to new communities both in Canada and abroad.
We can help with recruiting, onboarding/orientation, and retention so that you can easily understand the process of hiring talent from overseas. The resources listed below are completely free and downloadable, not to mention easy to use, print and share.
Sector Guides
These guides will help you understand the technical sectors in other countries with helpful, user-friendly resources for busy hiring staff. They can make a big difference when it comes to understanding immigrant applicants.
The B.C. Employer’s Guide to Hiring Internationally-Trained Engineers offers helpful information for any organization that recruits and hires workers from the engineering sector.
Check it before an interview for background economic, educational, professional and cultural information on the engineering sectors of Iran, China and the Philippines. You may find you understand your newcomer candidate much better.
The B.C. Employer’s Guide to Hiring Internationally-Trained ICT Professionals presents quick information on sectors where newcomers with computer-related experience have worked in China, the Philippines and Iran.
If you glance through this before an interview with a newcomer from one of these countries, you’ll have better insight into his/her experience and ways of working.
The B.C. Employer’s Guide to Hiring Internationally-Trained Life Sciences Professionals shows the background technology sectors of life science in the Philippines, Iran and China. By quickly reviewing the information inside, you’ll have a better understanding of a newcomer who has gained experience in one of those countries.
You’ll see the potential benefits and challenges each newcomer offers, all in a useful, but easy-to-skim document. Use this before an interview to maximize your understanding of selected newcomers in this field.
Employer Toolkit
This toolkit provides a set of easy-to-use hiring instruments for testing knowledge of applicants in a way that helps you navigate, learn and harness cultural or language differences among international candidates.
This self-assessment is intended to be completed and returned by the applicant several days before they arrive for their interview.
Tool 2 – Sector Knowledge Test:
A Sector Knowledge test provides evidence about the candidate’s knowledge of sector-specific matters that are critical to the job function.
Tool 3 – English Writing Test:
The ability to write in English is essential for most technical and professional jobs. This test template will help you easily test your candidates on their English literacy level.
The ITA Essential Skills Passport can be submitted by the candidate and focuses on Essential Skills, which are the foundation skills of reading, numeracy and document use.
Personality tests intended for personnel selection contain a series of questions or tasks and can help determine how candidates would fit in to your company.
A short practical test is invaluable for any recruitment, whether for newcomers or Canadians, so this template is an easy place to start.
With the help of a few of the previous tools, the interview becomes much more of a dialogue to which a candidate can more fully contribute and show his/her capabilities.
Tool 8 – Identifying Alternative Careers:
After a recruiter or HR professional has spent time assessing a candidate, they will have developed some key insights that can be useful for the candidate to understand. Even a brief talk about alternative roles will be helpful to a newcomer job seeker.
Being open to newcomer hires means being open to unorthodox references and thinking outside traditional referees, this guide provides extra context to understanding different international reference formats.
Inevitably, at the end of many interviews you will have to inform the candidates that they will not be recommended for hire. This short and helpful guide can make a rejected candidate feel respected and appreciated, even if they’re not suitable for a particular position.
Tool 11 – Learning Plan for Hired Candidates:
The assessments from Tools 1 to 6 and in particular Tool 7 (the Interview) will all identify aspects of the candidate’s knowledge, skills and behaviours that may need development.
Download a complete Selection Toolkit