Thinking outside-the-kitchen: Maritime employers try unconventional ways to recruit talent in a labour shortage

A Fredericton hotel is hoping a new strategy will attract the culinary talent they need – a $2,000 signing bonus for new hires.

The general manager at the Delta Hotel says they tried all the traditional methods to get people through the door, including working with a recruiter, but have found it very difficult to find new talent.  

“They're always hard to find, even pre-pandemic, but now for some reason, we all scratch our head and wonder where all the people have gone? And why there's nobody applying for any of the positions they used to come in droves for,” said Sara Holyoke.

She says the leadership team put their heads together to come up with an incentive that may be a little out-of-the-kitchen.

“We need to go big or go home. We want the top talent too, so we maybe also need to look outside of our market and be very open to, not just being a competitive payer, but have really good benefits,” Holyoke said. “But maybe we need to kind of almost have a marketing place around recruiting, and maybe that's an incentive like we just offered.”

Holyoke believes her staff are the best asset in the hospitality industry, so she double-checked with her team to ensure they were OK with it. She says their response was extremely positive.

“We've gone from one extreme, from being completely closed, and having to lay employees off and being very, very quiet,” she said. “To – boom - there's that pent-up demand for people to travel and have their conferences, and go out for dinner with their friends and get together and we're so excited about that but it's like, holy crow, we need staff!”

Horizon Health Network is trying something similar to recruit nurses, except the person who gets the money isn’t the new employee, it’s whoever referred them to the network. They receive a $1,000 reward.

“Let's see if it brings forward a huge wave of new recruits,” said New Brunswick Health Minister Dorothy Shephard last week. “I would welcome that. I think we just need to see where it goes.”

Halifax’s Chamber of Commerce says businesses need to be thinking outside the box when it comes to hiring these days. Kent Robert, vice-president policy, believes the labour shortage could be caused by a couple changes in people’s priorities.

“So, during COVID, an awful lot of people just packed it in and retired,” he said. “I think there's also a bit of people who had built-up savings during COVID, so they're probably being a little more choosy on where they go back to work and if they go back to the same job... And I think there was a massive amount of career change during that time.”

Robert suspects some went back to school or took training courses, so that they didn’t have to return to a job they didn’t like. He encourages businesses to offer some unconventional benefits, like bonuses, more vacation time, or flexible working conditions.

“A number on the piece of paper for a salary is always going to catch the eye but if you can really sweeten the pot with things that don't break your bank but make it much more appealing to the candidate,” he said.

“I'm really worried about the increasing salaries and wages, which is going to happen and it is happening, fueling more inflation. So, it's almost like a snowball, you know, inflation is rising so you need to pay your people more to get them and then inflation rises again. So, it's a pretty slippery slope.”

He says governments can help, like cutting red tape so that immigrants can enter the workforce faster, and making it easier for businesses to access temporary foreign workers.

He says the construction industry has been interested in offering a two-to-one apprentice/journeyman ratio for training, rather than the current one-to-one ratio. That move could double the number of people being trained in the skilled labour workforce.