Global Skills Hub Launches to Bring International Tech Talent to Canada

The search for talent in the tech world is a difficulty that every company endures, whether it be Shopify or a new startup.

The Global Skills Hub (GSH) is looking to help ease the pain of recruitment with a new turnkey service based in Toronto but focused on the rest of the world. The GSH helps find and hire international talent, manage the immigration process, and smoothly integrate the new workers into Canada.

The GSH was founded by Yousuf Khatib and Dominic Bortolussi. Bortolussi is the founder of The Working Group, a software development and design firm. It was there he realized the importance of finding the right talent and fit for a company.

“There is enormous value in unlocking the harmony of the right person, in the right role, aligned with the right team,” said Bortolussi. “At Global Skills Hub, I’m now excited to help remarkable people from around the world find their path to amazing growing Canadian companies.”

The team at GSH is mostly made up of HR and legal professionals, two professions that often have the most contact when it comes to bringing in new workers from a foreign country.

A recent report from the Information and Communications Technology Council found that Canada will need to fill 216,000 tech-related jobs by 2021. This crunch becomes especially difficult for SMEs as they cannot dedicate as many resources to recruiting and hiring new talent.

“As we delved deeper into understanding the challenges that Canadian companies were facing in tech recruitment, we realized a greater vision,” said Khatib, “Not only did companies need to source top talent, but companies also needed a cost-effective way to scale and also reduce the time-to-hire. By navigating the immigration process through the Global Skills Strategy and other programs, and tailoring technical, culture, and personality tests, we are providing our clients with a fast, reliable, and affordable way to hire top global technical talent.”

The GSH works by connecting willing Canadian companies with vetted international talent, then offering a quicker window to bring them into the country.

The candidates GSH works with come from two pools:

• International engineering managers, full stack developers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers living outside North America with 5+ years’ experience;
• International technologists with H-1B visas living in Silicon Valley and across the U.S. who are looking for new opportunities in Canada due to the political uncertainty in the U.S.

That second pool is becoming increasingly populated as more workers look to leave tech hubs in the U.S. and venture up to Canada.

GSH partnered with Plum.io and Filtered.AI in order to develop holistic profiles and speed up the time-to-hire. For candidates working outside North America, GSH has a “try-before-you-hire model that sees a candidate work remotely for a month, come to Canada to work in-office for a month, then head back to work remotely for another month and prepare to make the move.

The GSH model is based on charging $1,000 a month for 12 months, as they offer continued integration and guidance throughout the first year. This is cheaper than many recruitment firms that charge 20-25 per cent of the salary, which can often be upwards of $25,000.

Right now, some of the companies hiring through GSH include Arterys, Sensibill, TWG, Demac and BigTerminal. The listed jobs are mainly engineering and developing with some in product management and design.