Toronto's Tech Talent Crunch

‍

Even after this week's announcement by Shopify that they were cutting over 1000 jobs, the Toronto Tech sector remains strong.

In March, 2022 Meta announced that they were setting up in Toronto and would be hiring 2,500 people.

Putting pressure on local home-grown tech companies that were already struggling with an underserved talent market. In March 2020 it was estimated that there were 780,000 people employed in the tech sector, which has since increased to 855,555 as of June 2022.

Employment growth in the tech sector has been undeterred over the course of the pandemic and many US based tech companies have taken advantage of location specific advantages to establish operations in Canada. It is estimated that the current number of open vacancies in the Canadian tech sector is over 200,000 positions

Toronto is positioned as Canada’s largest Tech hub with international companies like Amazon, DoorDash,  Google, Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, Stripe, TikTok, Uber, Wayfair setting up and growing.

With a growing number of international names coming to the market, the demand for talent is not going away anytime soon. Tech professionals continue to hold more power than ever and have the opportunity to interview the company. While salary and benefits are important factors such as the hiring process, systems and user experience will either attract or deter talent.

The market for talent is truly global which means talent is able to work remotely anywhere in the world. Considering these changes will require companies to reimagine their employee perks and hiring packages. Increasingly relocation packages, visa support, education and childcare are becoming industry standards for negotiation.

‍