An 80s power ballad and a purple rabbit want to fix small business hiring. Canadian candidates would settle for a call back
Richard Marx promised to wait for as long as it took. Ontario employers with 25 or more staff get 45 days.
That’s the gap between pop music and provincial law, and it is the gap Employment Hero is playing in with its new brand campaign, “Your Next Hire is Right Here Waiting”. The Australian-founded HR, payroll and hiring platform, which bought Canadian HR software company Humi in a $100-million deal last year, is running the campaign in Canada, Australia and New Zealand until mid-December, according to Campaign Brief.
The borrowed tune is Marx’s “Right Here Waiting”, which spent five weeks at the top of the Canadian charts in the summer of 1989. In the ad, swamped small business owners are serenaded by windswept, backlit candidates lip-syncing straight down the lens, who are then verified and hired on the spot. The wind machine turns out to be Big Ears, the company’s purple rabbit mascot, holding a leaf blower just off camera.
It is very silly. Global marketing director Tasman Page says that’s the point: “We wanted to cut through category fatigue with an honest, playful reality check.”
The reality check goes like this. Instead of posting a job ad and sifting through a pile of résumés, employers are told the candidates are already inside the same platform that more than 350,000 businesses use to run HR, payroll and hiring. Expect to see it on connected TV, billboards, radio, digital audio and your social feeds between now and the holidays.
Read next: Canadian small business hiring lags as larger employers eye growth
Half a million vacancies and nobody calling back
Behind the hairspray is a labour market that doesn’t quite add up.
Canada shed 68,000 jobs in September, its second straight monthly decline, pushing unemployment to 6.5 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. Young people took the hardest hit, with youth unemployment sitting at 13 per cent.
Yet employers still had 501,000 vacant positions in July, a figure that has barely moved for seven months. And in an Express Employment Professionals survey earlier this year, 32 per cent of Canadian hiring managers said they had open roles they simply couldn’t fill.
So there are people who want work and jobs that want people. The bit in the middle, where they actually find each other, is where things fall apart.
Candidates have noticed. In a January survey of 1,004 Canadians on the Angus Reid Forum, commissioned by Employment Hero, 56 per cent suspected they had applied for a “ghost job”, a role advertised with no real intent to hire. Seventy per cent said being ghosted by an employer had affected their mental health and their motivation to keep looking, and 64 per cent had skipped applying for a job because the posting didn’t list a salary.
The usual caveat applies: a hiring software company has surveyed people about hiring and found hiring needs fixing. Even so, few HR professionals will argue with the direction of travel.
Read next: Nearly half of HR professionals admit they regularly post ‘ghost’ job ads: survey
Ontario has legislated the power ballad
What makes the Canadian version of this story interesting is that one province has already put a stopwatch on the waiting.
Since January 1, Ontario’s new job posting rules have required employers with 25 or more employees to tell interviewed applicants whether a hiring decision has been made within 45 days of their last interview. Public postings must also include expected pay and disclose whether artificial intelligence is being used to screen or select applicants.
That last point is worth flagging for anyone tempted by the AI side of the pitch. Employment Hero sells an AI recruitment agent that screens and shortlists candidates. In Ontario, if a covered employer uses a tool like that on a public posting, the ad needs to say so.
Employment Hero Canada CEO KJ Lee welcomed the rules when the survey came out, arguing that clarity on pay, process and timelines helps candidates stop feeling ignored. “Transparency builds trust and trust builds better hires,” he said.
Ontarians are hopeful but not naive. Among Ontario respondents, 88 per cent thought the rules would help job seekers, and 95 per cent expected employers to go looking for loopholes.
Read next: Entry-level jobs shrinking in Canada: report
There is one wrinkle in the “forget the job boards” message. Plenty of Canadian small businesses got there long ago, just with less tech.
A Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey found 62 per cent of small firms prefer personal connections and networks when recruiting, compared with 44 per cent using online job boards. In other words, the next hire is often right here waiting already, and they are somebody’s nephew.
The catch is that young Canadians aren’t on that grapevine. Almost three in four look for work on online job boards, according to the same HRD report, which is exactly where many small employers aren’t looking.
With budgets tight, owners are being choosy rather than freezing hiring altogether. Lee said in May that small businesses are “getting far more selective about where they place their bets”. Selective is fine. Silent is the problem.
Read next: Fake job interview behind US$6.3bn Binance heist puts hiring on notice
What HR can take from the song
None of this needs a leaf blower. Put the pay range on the posting. Tell applicants roughly how long the process will take, then stick to it. Send the “we’ve gone another way” email, even if your organization is under the 25-employee line and the law doesn’t make you.
Marx was willing to wait forever. Canadian candidates have bills to pay. A reply inside 45 days would be a fine place to start.
