This is the first installment of The Logic’s Talent Quarterly, a regular series on employment trends.
As the year began with sweeping layoffs in tech—led by major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google—one might expect that hiring across the sector has ground to a halt. Instead, recruiting efforts appear to have gone more underground, according to The Logic’s analysis of the latest jobs data and interviews with employment experts.
Companies are quiet hiring in an attempt to avoid the scrutiny some faced after mass layoffs
This is the first installment of The Logic’s Talent Quarterly, a regular series on employment trends.
As the year began with sweeping layoffs in tech—led by major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google—one might expect that hiring across the sector has ground to a halt. Instead, recruiting efforts appear to have gone more underground, according to The Logic’s analysis of the latest jobs data and interviews with employment experts.
While recruitment has slowed significantly compared with the frenzied days of 2021, many companies are still in need of skilled workers, said Ian Kinsella, North America managing director at recruitment firm Morgan McKinley. But with the industry tightening its belt, many companies have opted for a quieter, less public approach to hiring. Online job postings have been replaced by recruiters pursuing desired candidates privately and directly.
By the numbers
205,000: Net new jobs created in Canada in the first three months of 2023. The Bank of Canada cited the figure as part of its rationale for maintaining its overnight interest rate at 4.5 per cent on its April 12 decision, though it noted that higher rates were already “moderating the demand for labour” in some sectors.
$1.23: Average hourly wage growth among Canadian retail workers in 2022 compared to a year earlier; total average wages over the period increased to $24.70 per hour. Overall, wages have continued to grow as companies compete for talent, rising 5.2 per cent year over year as of March.
5.1%: The jobs increase in Ontario’s transportation and warehousing sector in March. Positions in that industry grew at a faster rate than some others, rising from 368,200 to 386,900 over the month. In Alberta, jobs in the sector grew 6.6 per cent.
“There are absolutely people still hiring. It’s just a little bit cloak-and-dagger at the moment,” Kinsella said in an interview.
The quiet-hiring practice is perhaps an attempt to avoid the scrutiny some tech giants faced for their handling of mass layoffs, Kinsella said. Twitter scrambled last year to hire back a number of engineers it had just fired, while some Google employees found out they had been laid off after they had been locked out of their devices.
More than 170,748 tech workers have been laid off around the world since the start of 2023, according to the website layoffs.fyi.
“We’ve seen ripple effects from the likes of Google laying off people and then advertising roles, and getting a bit of poor feedback for doing so,” Kinsella said.
A labour-market mystery
The changing approach to hiring comes amid the backdrop of a persistently tight labour market across Canada. Outside of tech, employment continues to run hot. Canada added 205,000 new jobs in the first three months of 2023, while unemployment remained at around five per cent for the months of January, February and March.
That robustness has confounded experts, who wonder why demand for talent hasn’t yet tailed off in the face of economic uncertainty and higher interest rates. Even after the federal government cranked the immigration taps all the way open following the COVID-19 border closures—the country’s population in the third quarter of 2022 grew at the fastest rate since 1957—job vacancies are stubbornly high. While some of that might be attributed to changing attitudes toward work following the pandemic, it’s not entirely clear why positions remain unfulfilled.
“What I’m seeing is mystifying me,” said Sheila Block, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
A minute of your time
Economic uncertainty has led firms to take a cautious approach to hiring. In an effort to stay lean, many companies are opting to bring on workers on a contract basis rather than full time, a trend that experts have witnessed across tech and other industries.
People on the move
Recruiters who had previously quickly received approval for any hires they wanted to make, Kinsella said, now find themselves with spending limitations that make contractors more appealing.
“Because it doesn’t add to headcount, it’s a way that a lot of leaders are at least alleviating some of the workload for their team,” Kinsella said. “We’ve seen a lot of that; it seems to be a trend for this year.”
“I think everyone is now very familiar with their CFO, if they weren’t before.”
Now hiring
Even if executives are cautious about expanding their workforces given the current uncertainty, many still see a need to fill crucial roles.
The California-based recruiting agency Robert Half found in a recent survey that hiring needs outweigh economic uncertainty among Canadian companies. In the first half of 2023, 51 per cent of companies surveyed expected to hire for new roles. For the second half, 40 per cent planned to hire for new roles, and 50 per cent expected to hire for vacated positions.
David Bolton, a Vancouver-based regional director at Robert Half, said that while the pandemic scrambled job markets by causing severe fluctuations in specific regions, the post-pandemic jobs market has been about as robust as he’s seen in years.
“I would probably say it’s been maybe the best, tightest market now in terms of taking away those COVID years.”
With files from Sebastian Leck
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You’re invited to The Logic’s Kitchener-Waterloo subscriber meetup, on Thursday, May 4, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Catalyst Commons, 137 Glasgow St., Kitchener, Ont. In partnership with Artemis Canada and Catalyst Commons, we’re convening our KW subscribers, partners and business leaders for an evening of networking and a panel discussion on workforce trends to launch The Logic’s new Talent Quarterly franchise. Please RSVP to [email protected] by April 25 if you’d like to attend.
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Photo: The Canadian Press/Cole Burston
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