Headlines across the country last week reported Canada’s lowest jobless rate in nearly four decades at 5.7 per cent. We also made history with job gains in April, whereby employment rose by 106,500 representing our biggest one-month increase dating back to 1976.

In this working climate, I had a very interesting conversation at a conference recently that I just can’t shake, and wanted to share.

I was sitting at a table with fellow Canadian recruiters from other agencies. One woman was telling us how she had established Bilingual/French recruiting divisions in the past, for three other companies for whom she had worked. But, she said, she has gotten out of that business now because it was just too hard. She said things are just not what they used to be 20 years ago.

Undeniably, we are in a very tight job market – which often feels like we’re at the mercy of jobseekers, across many industries and provinces. Today, HR/hiring managers are dealing with candidates who ghost them, and bidding wars between companies trying to nab top talent. It’s even tighter among Bilingual/French talent.

Still, I don’t agree that it’s too hard to get Bilingual/French talent these days. In fact, for us as recruiters who specialize in this area, dare I say, it’s gotten easier!

We have access to so many more resources than we’ve ever had in the past and so much more information is publicly shared and available online today.

But there is one more, critically important factor: our talent network.

When you dedicate time and energy into it – today, it has become way easier to cultivate and track a targeted talent pool, in order to maintain that highly-coveted network. Time and time again, these personal connections that we foster, deliver for us in business, and lead to happy clients who keep coming back to us.

Let’s pull back the curtain on this, and delve deeper. We’re feeling inspired to share our secrets to successful recruiting, especially in today’s tight job market.

Twenty years ago, Bilingual/French jobseekers and employees were not online. They were very hard to identify in a crowded marketplace. Today, at BlueSky Personnel Solutions, we have the people, so to speak.

We know where they are. We keep track of who’s looking for work, who’s on the market, and who’s been on a job for a while where it may be time for a change or an upgrade. We make it our business to know such information, like it’s our bread and butter. It’s what we do every day.

That is how we successfully maintain an enviable network of Canada’s top Bilingual/French talent.

And that is why, many new clients spend months trying to fill their Bilingual/French positions internally, or through other generalist agencies, without success. Then they find us, give us the order, and we fill those positions quickly and efficiently.

It’s also why so many of our clients keep coming back to us, and many now work with us exclusively. They tell us they know we’ll get the job done, so they have no need to go elsewhere.

There are also some things we do that we believe should be a part of recruitment best practices across our industry:

We respect every job candidate with whom we come into contact. We work off of a philosophy that: even though a candidate may be a close second choice for one of our clients today, they may very well become a top choice for another client tomorrow.

We’ve witnessed our industry suffering from a bad reputation where jobseekers say too many recruiters never get back to them, they don’t call back, they don’t reply to emails until they need something. We educate our candidates on our processes up front, to manage their expectations. We let jobseekers know ahead of time that if we don’t have a job for them, we won’t get back to them at this point in time, because we simply don’t have the bandwidth. As well, we make sure not to over-promise opportunities to candidates. If we can help them, we will definitely be in touch. If not, we’ll keep their profile in our network and on our radar. When we educate candidates, they appreciate us.

At BlueSky Personnel Solutions (and thankfully, many other great agencies out there), we believe it is critical to cultivate a fruitful relationship with jobseekers. When we respect them, they will in turn respect us, and trust us.

Ultimately, success in the recruitment industry, we believe, is all about relationships and making the right connections between people. When you love what you do and feel a real passion for this work – as we do, it really doesn’t feel like work at all. For that, we are so grateful!

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We hope these tips help you with your talent search. But if you, like many of our clients, have a growing to-do list of other critical HR deliverables, give us a call today at: 416-236-3303 or email us at: [email protected]. It would be our pleasure to support you on your Bilingual/French hiring needs.