Right now in eastern Ontario, there are approximately 31,250 residents who are available for work and able to work but are not working. Workforce development professionals call these residents the Hidden Workforce.
Ontario East has created a resource page to help employers get hiring help so that they can tap into this Hidden Workforce, improve opportunities for all residents of the region, and improve recruitment and retention in eastern Ontario. Read on to learn more about the Hidden Workforce and how to reach these residents as an employer looking to hire new candidates.
Understand the Hidden Workforce for Hiring Help
The Hidden Workforce consists of eastern Ontario residents who are impacted by factors that excluded them from the workforce. These factors may have also caused them to opt out of the workforce completely. Factors like:
- age; youth and retired residents can be members of the Hidden Workforce
- gender
- poverty
These factors may cause residents to be overlooked for jobs. They may mean that residents require different training, schedules, or accommodations then others. But these residents are valuable members of the eastern Ontario community and have a lot to offer, learn, and do in the region.
Recruitment and retention in eastern Ontario is impacted by this Hidden Workforce because currently most employers don’t know they exist (they’re hidden after all) and therefore cannot recruit them. Instead many employers in eastern Ontario are recruiting from the same static pool of residents, making it seem like there is a gap in the region’s workforce.
To ensure that hiring practices aren’t exclusionary, employers can audit their processes to find gaps where residents might slip through the cracks.
To understand where hiring gaps exist and get more hiring help, browse the Hidden Workforce Resource Page.
Ontario East has created and collected tools and resources to help employers:
- better understand the Hidden Workforce
- find strategies to recruit from this demographic
- implement policies to retain employees once they’re hired
External links are provided as informational resources only and are not necessarily endorsed by Ontario East.
.png)
