Retailjob.ca job board becomes retail.ca
Manuel Francisci, President of jobWings Careers, announced the change in name of specialized retail job board retailjob.ca to retail.ca (the French name becomes detail.ca).Along with the name change, the site has been updated: The graphic interface has been revisited as well as the search engine. Retail.ca has also entered the Web 2.0 era with the creation of a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/retailca. Job ads can be shared on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Finally, Retail.ca now has a mobile version of its site for consulting the ads using iPhones, BlackBerries, iPads or Android phones.
Taleo acquires Jobpartners
SaaS (Service as a software) talent management provider Taleo, which was founded in Quebec and operates in Canada, the U.S. and Asia, has just announced the acquisition of Jobpartners for $38 million. This strategic purchase will allow the company to expand in Europe, where Jobpartners has an established customer base, including many companies in the CAC 40, and doubling Taleo’s customer portfolio of large companies. The teams’ expertise also factored in the decision, with Jobpartners offering pure SaaS and mastery of the European market. The future of Jobpartners’ solutions has not yet been decided; over the next few months, the two companies will work together on how to incorporate them into Taleo’s products.
E-mails from the boss on weekends increasingly frequent
One in three employees often gets e-mails from his or her boss on weekends, and is expected to reply, according to a survey conducted by Right Management. It specifies that the e-mails are not purely informational communications, but specific requests awaiting a response.
An additional one-third of 569 respondents in North America said they sometimes get e-mails from their boss on the weekend, but not often. Only 37% of respondents said they had never received any. The poll notes that it is now taken for granted that everyone has to check their work e-mail during the weekend.
Talent war
According to the latest Randstad Workmonitor poll, more than 50% of Canadian employees believe that the massive retirement of the baby boomers and declining population growth will directly affect their careers, vs. 73% of Chinese, 49% of Americans and only 18% of Germans.
The consequence of these demographic changes means that companies are waging a talent war. One third of Canadian respondents said that their company is having difficulty hiring qualified people to fill job openings. Twenty-three percent said they were underqualified for their jobs, and 51% said that advancing in their career was more dependent on training and education than before.
CallCentrejob.ca has launched a new, more intuitive version
CallCentrejob.ca has just launched a new version of its site and added new services to help job seekers and recruiters meet up. “There are a lot of job openings in the call centre industry, and recruiters are always looking for motivated candidates,” explains Manuel Francisci, President of jobWings Careers and founder of CallCentrejob.ca. “We overhauled CallCentrejob.ca in order to better meet the needs of recruiters and job seekers in this field.” The layout of CallCentrejob.ca has been streamlined, to better see the job ads, and the search engine has also been optimized. There is also a mobile version of the site for consulting on iPhones, BlackBerries, iPads and Android devices.
Employee disengagement a timely topic
According to Mercer’s new What’s Working™ survey of nearly 30,000 workers in 17 countries, slightly more than one in three Canadians are considering quitting their jobs, half are disengaged and 22% are increasingly dissatisfied.
The desire to go see elsewhere is particularly evident in young 16- to 34-year-old Canadians (44%). The 80% of employees who had a sense of personal accomplishment at work in 2006 has plummeted to 68% in 2011. Only 53% of respondents said they were satisfied with their base pay, and only slightly more felt they were paid fairly given their performance. The only positive finding was that 66% of Canadian employees rated their overall benefit program as good or very good.
Sapphire Canada rebranded as Randstad Technolologies
As of June 6, Sapphire Canada, the IT staffing specialist, officially became Randstad Technologies, making Randstad Canada one of the top three world leaders in professional staffing and recruiting. Randstad Technologies now has a larger bank of candidates and intends to improve the quality of its services via the incorporation of new practices, an expanded recruiting pool of professionals and a greater variety of HR solutions.
Average salaries going up
The average salary of non-farm employees climbed 0.5% between February and March 2011, an increase of 4.1% vs. last year. Nova Scotia had the smallest increases, while Quebec, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador topped the list. The most significant increases were in wholesaling and manufacturing. Statistics Canada says that the growth in salaries is mainly attributable to increased working hours—33 hours a week on average. Variations in job make-up and degree of work experience also contributed to the increase.
Work absences
According to Statistics Canada, 8% of full-time employees took at least one week off for personal reasons in 2010, averaging 9.1 days per employee, for a total of 100 million workdays lost. Women took more time off than men (11 days vs. 7.6). There were more absences in the public sector (11.8 days on average) than the private sector (8.2 days). Primary industries and professional, scientific and technical services had the fewest absences, while the health care and social assistance industry, and public administration, had the most.
Canadians not planning ahead for retirement
HSBC’s latest retirement report cites the surprising fact that two out of three Canadians do not have a financial plan fore retirement, far from the global average of 50%. Paradoxically, Canadians also worry about not having enough money to retire on. Three quarters said that not having to worry about money was essential for a happy retirement, and 63% of those worried think they have not saved enough. The main obstacle cited by those who do not have a retirement plan was the lack of household income. According to HSBC, however, people who plan for retirement have about 2.5 times more assets when they stop working than non-planners.
Number of civil servants increasing
According to Statistics Canada, the public sector currently employs 3.6 million workers, representing 10.6% of the total population, broken down as follows: government (38.2%), educational institutions (29.5%), health and social service institutions (23.5%) and government business enterprises (8.7%). Public sector employment was up 0.3% vs. Q4 2010. The increase was mainly in health and social services institutions, and in local government, with employment slightly down for the federal government and in universities and colleges.