We Want You!

The wrong recruitment strategy can backfire, ruining your company’s reputation and scaring away the very employees you hoped to attract. Here’s how to add to your labour pool without getting wet

Nov 1, 2008  

by Shannon Sutherland

Ironically, it was Canada Day when the Tuesday edition of the London Daily Mail hit the streets and Canuck pride took one in the chin. That day’s paper featured the latest instalment of an acerbic rant against an Alberta government mission that had arrived in Britain four days previous.

As more than two million groggy-eyed Britons gulped their morning tea, they learned all about Canada’s sinister plot to siphon nurses, doctors, engineers and other talent out of the British labour pool. One article called it “one of the most audacious recruitment raids since Australia poached a million Britons – known as the Ten Pound Poms after the ship fare they paid – in the 1950s and ’60s.”

A million Britons? The Daily Mail overestimated the Alberta mission’s ambition. Over the next year, the Alberta government plans to increase the number of temporary foreign workers and immigrants, including those arriving through the Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program, to 50,000. Only a fraction of those will come from Britain.

But there was no arguing that the Alberta government was definitely hoping to dip into the British labour pool. Hector Goudreau, Alberta’s minister of employment and immigration, met with government officials and business groups in Germany and the United Kingdom in a whirlwind tour from June 24 to July 2 in an attempt to bolster economic emigration, and the diligent Daily Mail was there to chronicle it all.

Even the beloved beaver took a beating. One columnist quoted a writer who described Canada this way: “The beaver, which has come to represent Canada as the eagle does the United States and the lion Britain, is a flat-tailed, slow-witted, toothy rodent known to bite off its own testicles or to stand under its own falling trees.” Take that, Canada!

Some began to question whether the mission had actually backfired. After all, the pro-Alberta message, touting the province’s lower cost of living and beautiful mountain vistas, did reach 2.3 million British citizens. But so did reports of Canada as a cultural wasteland with interminable winters.

The standoff exemplifies the current tug of war over talent that is occurring every day as desperate Alberta businesses attempt to recruit people from around the world, across the country, and even across the street. The problem is that in a tug of war, both sides usually get dragged through the mud.

While many Brits attacked the Alberta government for trying to lure away its workers, it didn’t really seem to bother the province at all. In fact, since then, the government either has sent or plans to send delegations to recruit citizens in Liverpool, Coventry, Birmingham, Germany, Paris, Brussels, Toulouse and the U.S. Clearly, no amount of beaver-bashing is going to keep recruiters out of the U.K. This is the state of recruiting today. If you’re not told to bugger off by someone who undeniably outranks you – and if you haven’t been arrested, blackballed or boycotted – it’s all good.

“We don’t go where governments have specifically said they do not want any recruiting occurring. South Africa clearly doesn’t want us or any other countries coming there and recruiting workers, for example, and so we respect that,” says Sorcha McGinnis, a public affairs officer with Alberta Employment and Immigration. “You have to be very careful how you approach international recruiting, especially in developing countries where they need skilled workers to complete infrastructure projects and to move ahead. The U.S., for example, is a good market to recruit from, because the economy is slower there right now, and there is a growing number of people unemployed or underemployed. Anywhere we go, though, is ell-researched first. You do have to be careful.”

It’s not just the government that has to be careful. Recruiting willy-nilly can do serious damage to a business’s reputation and the reputations of professional recruiters. But in the current market, it’s also tough to argue with results. Unless you’re recruiting college kids or the chronically unemployed, you’re taking people from someone else. And when you do, no one is likely to pat you on the back and say, “That was some damn fine recruiting, Bob!”

When Katie Bowkett, vice-president of Vancouver-based placement agency the Personnel Department, was asked about the ethics and etiquette of recruiting, she replied, “You mean, do we do headhunting?” She might as well have said, “You mean, do we drink potty water?”

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