Finding great talent in today’s highly competitive marketplace isn’t easy, but finding great bilingual talent is even harder.

Employees who can speak, read and write both French and English proficiently offer companies many competitive advantages when doing business across Canada, and they are in very high demand. In comparison, the bilingual talent pool in Ontario is currently not quite big enough to fully meet existing demand. As such, when skilled bilingual job candidates decide to make a move, they get scooped up quickly by prospective employers.

This means the age-old “post and pray” strategy of putting up a job posting and hoping the right people will apply is almost ineffective for bilingual recruitment nowadays.

At BlueSky Personnel Solutions, our bilingual recruitment strategies are highly targeted. Often, we reverse engineer the process and start our search by focusing on a short-list of talent who we pre-identify as potentially having a great fit with our clients’ needs.

For in-house recruiters, it’s not always possible to do the same, as it can raise ethical concerns around competitive intel and poaching, for example.

In such a hiring landscape, it’s great to see when companies break the recruitment marketing mould, putting out initiatives that turn heads.

One company in Windsor, Ontario, Cypher Systems Group, recently did just that and caught the media’s attention.

They used a mass marketing medium: out-of-home advertising (billboard advertising) to attract a very niche audience, namely French/bilingual talent. Their strategy? Create an ad with only French copy. Hence, the advertisement will then only resonate with those who can speak French. Often the best ideas are the simplest ideas, and this company’s strategy was smart, simple and straightforward – in order words, effective, in our opinion.

CBC/Radio-Canada approached our very own Julie Labrie, president of BlueSky Personnel Solutions and asked for her opinion on this company’s recruitment efforts. You can read that article and Julie’s commentary here (please note: the article is published in French only).

If you are looking for bilingual/French talent for your organization, contact our fully-bilingual in-house specialists today at: 416-236-3303 or via email at: [email protected]. We are one of Canada’s leading bilingual/French recruitment agencies, and it would be our pleasure to assist you in finding the best talent for your organization.