New website helps ethnic jobseekers

New website helps ethnic jobseekers

When looking for a job, the best place to start is with companies that are looking for you.
That’s the advice of Celia Sankar, executive director of the DiversityCanada Foundation.

“Many companies are now actively seeking to make their workforce more representative of the rich mixture of cultures and backgrounds in Canada today,” said Sankar, whose non-profit organisation works towards linking jobseekers with such businesses through its website, http://DiversityCanada.com.

“Employers in the public and private sector realise that hiring people of various ethnicities and cultures is not only the fair thing to do, but it makes great business sense,” Sankar said.

Businesses are finding they are better able to understand and relate with their increasingly diversified customer base if their own employees come from that diversified pool. They also benefit from the injection of new ideas and new perspectives the employees from differing backgrounds can provide.

Several larger companies that are regulated by or do business with the federal government are required by Canada’s Employment Equity legislation to hire jobseekers from groups that have traditionally been under-represented in the workforce, such as visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples, women and people with disabilities.

“Additionally, Canadian employers are recognising that diversifying their workforce is an inevitible exercise,” Sankar said. “This is the wave of the future and many companies are implementing changes so they won’t be caught unawares.”

Census figures show that three quarters of the immigrants who landed in Canada during the 1990s belonged to visible minority groups. Those immigrants who were in the labour force in 2001 represented almost 70 per cent of the total growth of the labour force over the decade.

According to Statistics Canada, if current immigration rates continue, it is possible that immigration could account for virtually all labour force growth by 2011.

Sankar herself is part of those statistics. A former associate editor of the Trinidad Express, one of the Caribbean’s leading newspapers, she emigrated to Canada in 1998 and worked in the Vancouver bureau of The Globe And Mail and as the municipal affairs reporter for The Vancovuer Sun. She set the groundwork for the establishment of the DiversityCanada Foundation after she did a cross-Canada book promotion and media tour, during which she met many immigrants who felt they were worse off in Canada because they could not find jobs at the level of their qualifications.

The DiversityCanada Foundation’s website, http://diversitycanada.com, caters for jobseekers in traditionally under-represented groups. Into its second year online, the site provides users with a revolutionary new approach to finding jobs.

First, it features jobs from only employers who are actively seeking to hire people of diverse backgrounds and abilities.

“This way, jobseekers know that every employer they find on our site has put out a welcome mat for them,” Sankar said.

Second, DiversityCanada.com provides a real jobs search engine, that is a site that functions like the popular search site Google.

“The difference is that when someone enters a search term at DiversityCanada.com, the results will take them to the websites of only employers who are looking to diversify,” Sankar said. “There are never any irrelevant or unnecessary results from websites that have nothing to do with employment for Canadians.”

Jobseekers can post their resumes at DiversityCanada.com so employers can find them. The services are free of charge to jobseekers.

(PRESS RELEASE)