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Employers stretched to recruit workers in B.C.’s pandemic recovery economy

September 29, 2022

Restaurant supplier Russell Hendrix’s managers had to do a lot of juggling in the company’s flagship showroom to cover for two floor sales jobs that took months to fill, even offering $1,000 signing bonuses.

“Vancouver was a challenge for me before the pandemic, but the pandemic just made it a lot harder,” said Anna Blaszczynska, the company’s vice-president of human resources, who has taken the “unprecedented” step of using a recruiting agency to find those showroom sales reps, which is usually an entry-level position.

And with B.C.’s province-wide unemployment rate near record lows, 4.8 per cent as of August, according to Statistics Canada’s labour force survey, Blaszczynska doesn’t know “if there’s going to be an end to this.”

B.C. isn’t alone. Nation-wide, the workforce that was first upended by massive job losses at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is being upended again by multiple forces.

In many cases, workers aren’t returning to jobs they lost, having opted to switch careers. Then there is the simple demographic pressure of workers retiring faster than new candidates entering the workforce.

 

Source: Vancouver Sun
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