By Canadian HR Reporter | Link to Article
By Canadian HR Reporter | Link to Article
Canada’s global competitiveness will suffer unless companies deal with biases that are keeping professional immigrants underemployed, experts say.
“Many people still don’t get it. They still think that accepting immigrants to Canada is a social agenda, not recognizing that it is absolutely essential… for our global competitiveness,” said Wendy Cukier, founder and director of the Diversity Institute at Ryerson University.
“Companies need to realize it’s a competitive advantage to have people in your organization who look like the people you’re going to serve, if you want to expand internationally.”
There are many government programs that seek to integrate professional immigrants into the Canadian workforce, but those attempts haven’t always been successful. A 2008 study by the Conference Board of Canada pointed to statistics that show that as many as 40 per cent of skilled immigrants who come to Canada move away to pursue opportunities elsewhere within the first 10 years.
A report released last month by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce found the national unemployment rate among recent immigrants in the prime working-age group of 25 to 54 was more than double that of Canadian-born individuals.
More than half of the recent immigrants had a university degree, compared to a quarter of the Canadian-born population, yet their unemployment rate was 12 per cent, five times the unemployment rate for university-educated, Canadian-born individuals.
“There are big gaps between expectations many immigrants have, especially well-educated ones who are prosperous in their home country and come to Canada to find they face barriers in a number of ways,” said Cukier.
One of those barriers remains discrimination, she added, whether it’s through the failure of recognizing foreign credentials from top foreign universities or showing an unintentional bias for Anglo-Saxon names in selecting candidates for interviews.
“There is no doubt from the research that we’ve done (that) discrimination exists, even though some of it may in fact be unintentional, and it’s a result of people just not thinking or not being sufficiently knowledgeable about some of these issues,” she said.
Helen Hai says a lack of Canadian experience and having English as a second language were the two biggest challenges she faced when she came to Canada. She had left a management position at HSBC in her native China when her husband’s company transferred him to the Toronto area in 2011.
She had believed her experience with an international bank would help her land a similar job in Canada but, instead, found herself volunteering while she applied for job after job.
Hai was eventually hired as a customer service agent at a major Canadian bank, but will now have to work her way back up the corporate ladder.
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