Hi All,
I am a new immigrant and have landed here with a job by god's grace. I am an IT professional. In my attempt to help all new immigrants and future immigrants I am posting job postings which I receive in the mail.
As a thumb rule the following points may help you get a job soon, this is what I personally did and I found 2 jobs one as soon as I landed last year to complete my landing formalities and another recently which I have taken up.
1. Create a Canadian format CV - This is super important, most people from India and other asian counties have CVs which run into pages and also include a lot of unnecessary info such as Date of Birth, religion, father's name, marital status, name of school, college etc. Get rid of all these junk data from your CV. Here in Canada nobody is interested in these details, all they want to know is are you qualified to do the job? do you have relevant experience in a similar job? are you able to articulate your skills clearly on your CV? thats all. remember your CV is like a movie poster, looking at the poster you should want to watch the movie, if the poster itself is boring then there is a good chance nobody will watch the movie!!
2. If you are coming from the middle east then please please lower your expectations, the economy of the middle east is flush with oil money and companies there will often pay you a lot of money for jobs like administrative officer or secretarial jobs. In Canada and the real world such is not the case, I have worked in the middle east and have seen a lot of south asians and south east asians working in jobs like office assistant and making 3000-4000 US$, nowhere else in the world will a job like that be paid a salary like that. In Canada your salary is related to the skills the job requires and the availability of those skills in the market, so if you want to wok in a generic field then be prepared for a generic salary.
3. Survival jobs are ok but if they are also a trap, if you take a survival job then you will see money coming in to your hands and more often than not survival jobs squeeze a lot of work from you in the form of overtime etc, so at the end of the day you will hardly have the time or the energy to focus on your original job hunt in your chosen field. I know a guy who came to Canada took up a job as a waiter just to survive its been 7 years and he is still a waiter because he doesnt have time to look for another job , plus he is earning decent salary so he has become complacent, he is a accountant by profession, but now a full time waiter...not because of Canada...because of the choice he made
4. If you are in a profession which is regulated in Canada, please do enough and more research about your field of work and the requirements for certification etc before even buying your ticket to Canada. This is important because in some cases you may have to get strong reference from employers or educational institutions or governing bodies in your respective countries before even applying for credential assessment in Canada. There is no point in coming here in a big rush, then finding out you need 20 documents to be attested by your college/employer and then blaming Canada for not providing you opportunities. This country works on rules and principles, follow them and there is equal opportunity to all if you want to bypass or find a shortcut then in all probability you will simply lose your way!!
5. Brush up your skills in your field of work, there are a lot of people especially in the IT field who are doing a job just because they happened to get an opportunity in that field and then just continued there and learnt technology or technical skills on the job. In Canada even if you are an IT guy with 20 yrs experience you have to prove your knowledge and in this respect certifications like CCNA, MCSE, PMP, ITIL etc are extremely helpful, because these are issued by global organizations and go a long way in establishing your credibility.
6. Networking is super super important. Both the jobs that I got in Canada, I got them through linked in, by building professional contacts. I must have applied for close to 200 jobs before I came here, but the fact that I was not physically available for interviews in Canada plus the fact that I had not worked for any Canadian company made it really really tough for me to land a job, so what I id is I modified my CV. I have worked for MNC companies like IBM and HP, so in my CV I just mentioned as IBM and HP without mentioning locations (india), this way I was able to get the attention of the person going through my CV, which means he was curious to meet me, a person who has worked for IBM or HP and then it was upto me. This small trick helped me get an opportunity to atleast interview for the job, after that it was upto me to impress the potential employer!!
7. Never apply for more than one job in the same company. Though there maybe more than one suitable job, please choose the best one and apply for it. I know that we all would like to increase our chances, but by applying for more than one job in the same company what we are communicating is that we are desperate for a job and that we really dont know which job we want an also that we are ready to take anything thrown our way. This really gives a negative impression, so try not to do it.
8. Communication is extremely important. I mean your English language skills, I am not saying you should speak English with a perfect accent or you should know the queen's English. You should be able to communicate your thoughts clearly and without any mother tongue influence. when you apply for a job and give a phone interview, you are nothing but a voice on the other end, and if that voice is not clear and understandable, then the person interviewing my lose interest or get frustrated and you will end up losing an opportunity. For your own sake, polish your communication skills. speak slowly without any accent that's all that is required, try not to use fillers like "you know", "like", "I mean", etc. when you use a phrase too many times while speaking the other person unconsciously starts paying attention only to that phrase, you can check this for yourself, speak to somebody who uses such fillers often and you will see how much of the conversation you actually paid attention to.
this by the way is a clinically proven fact!!
Please contact he links/email/contact numbers in the ads directly. I dont know any of these people, I am just posting whatever I can find.
All the Best & God Bless
Cheers,
Rishab
