Buddy

Hi all,

My husband is Sr Software Developer. We are going to be in Toronto next month for a short break, and thought it a good opportunity to meet with some agencies.

Can anyone recommend IT agencies in Toronto?

Many thanks for your help

MR79

Have a look on the Robert Half Technology website.

Zap0ne

Hi Buddy,

I cannot recommend any agency in particular but there are a lot of them, especially in the IT field. I would suggest that you check out the market and see what employers are looking for;-

http://www.workopolis.com/work.aspx?...inView&lang=EN

http://www.monster.ca

Is a good start as you can see both employers and agencies advertising positions? Searching on the web, you will be able to find a number of directory sites that list head hunters and agents alike.

http://www.headhuntersdirectory.com/...o/Toronto5.htm

http://www.higherbracket.ca

You might want to consider investing some time and effort in changing your CV to a Resume together with your approach. Employers have slightly different expectations, some very subtle, and you will do better by conforming to the market. I can recommend a book that I found very useful myself when I first arrived. Like so many immigrants found myself unemployed in the first year due to a flaky employer and had to get a position quickly before the cash ran out. It worked for me…you never know.

What Color is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard Nelson Bolles

http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Color-Y...4441348&sr=1-1

Hope that this helps

Flyingscottie

Great tips, thanks!

Buddy

Many thanks for all of your help - much appreciated

SirTainly

One thing I've noted in my search of the jobsites is that IT Recruiters in Canada seem to be recruiting for their own consultants rather than directly for their clients. It looks to me these operate more like the umberella companies for IT contractors in the UK. I could be wrong here but that's my observation.

dbd33

There are several flavours:

- recruitment for permanent positions, often a company will engage a recruitment company to handle inital selection of candidates for a position exclusively; it's no good applying directly to the client.

- recruitment as an employee consultant, sweatshops such as CGI and EDS hire on this basis though, to a large extent, they've been undercut by offshore sweatshops (none of which are represented by posters here)

- recruitment as a contractor, straight up pimping. This can be arranged in a number of ways, small cut no factoring, large cut rate kept secret, anything in between; the essence of it though is that the pimp knows the client and supplies bodies, the client firm will typically only deal through a small number of pimps, individual managers at that fim only through one

- recruitment of a pimp, this is the case that the contractor finds the client, the client wants to engage the contractor but a pimp on the supplier list is needed, the contractor phones around official suppliers looking for the best cut.

imo the Toronto contract market is

cliquey, contracts go to mates of contractors,

bent, suppliers aren't on the lists because they have good contractors - all the pimps have the same few contractors on offer,

difficult to break into, contractors find jobs through other contractors and a new person doesn't know any,

reasonably rewarding financially, it's not unusal for a contract to last for ten years at a sensible rate, say half of IBM's current rate. Note that as a rule of thumb contract work in Toronto pays about half of the London rate for the same contract

not very rewarding day-to-day, the long term contracts are typically to shadow someone. That is, an employee is being paid to do a job but the contractor actually does it. The work may not be so bad but the employee is always there, spitting on the carpet and gloating over doing nothing for his or her pension.

Zap0ne

I think that you hit the nail on the head for many seeking work here that it tends to be more a case of who you know and not what you know. I would say that I had success by networking and getting in front of potential employers then I ever did by applying for advertised jobs.

DigitalGhost

Is the market focused more on permanent staff or contractors on the whole over there at the moment?

A couple of years ago there were quite a lot of contracting roles in the UK but now it seems to have moved towards a more permanent market instead. I am usually called a few times a week by agencies to discuss some IT role or another but they always seem to be about permanent roles these days.

dbd33

Can't help there. I've been a contractor since, as best I recall, 1985. I have hired people from abroad, people with specific skills, as contractors, but that's because we only deal with contractors; employees come with tax liabilities, employment standards, all that baggage one doesn't need from an immigrant.

DigitalGhost

Can someone really be sponsored for a TWP/PNP to work in a contracting capacity though? As I really don't think that would happen in the UK.

SirTainly

The paperwork I have for getting my Bunac Visa says that I can't work for myself, so I'd wonder how that would stack up if you wanted to work as a contractor (no idea if this is true of all TWP). I'm guessing you still could but you'd be an employee of the employment agency and therefore wouldn't get the benefits of being truly freelance.

dbd33

I don't see why not. Lots of jobs now have hourly pay and no benefits, those would be the defining features of contracting so far as immigration is concerned. To pick a colourful example, it's usual to import strippers on work permits. I imagine much the same conditions apply to any sort of physically dangerous work, an oil company isn't likely to offer a benefit package to people who work in drilling and so might have cause to use the benefits.

dbd33

In Canada the "benefits of being truly freelance" is to the agency, not the contractor. Lots of agents will only engage contractors who are incorporated as otherwise the contractor counts as a person and that raises a whole bunch of concerns in the areas of liability, taxation and employment standards.

DigitalGhost

Incidentally, I'm in the same position and was also wondering about this too, and in particular the highlighted part although since contracting in Canada is, by all accounts, nowhere near as beneficial as it is in Britain, I would ideally be looking for permanent work over there anyway if I could help it.