Windsor area has highest number of people working, looking for work in years
More than 183,000 people locally are employed
A Windsor recruitment agency says in recent months they've seen more businesses in desperate need of workers, along with more people taking on "survival jobs."
Marica Soleski, president of Prostaff Employment Solutions in Windsor, says when she asks people what kind of job they're looking for, they respond with, "I'll take anything."
The Windsor Census Metropolitan Area's (CMA) workforce is seeing a record participation rate — which is the number of people 15 and older who are working or looking for work. According to Workforce WindsorEssex, an organization that monitors local employment trends, the rate has increased to 65 per cent — the highest in seven years.
But, at the same time, Workforce WindsorEssex's CEO Justin Falconer said there's also a high unemployment rate — 8.2 per cent for January, according to Statistics Canada — and thousands of active job postings.
"In Windsor, we have jobs without people and people without jobs," Falconer said.
High number of workers
The high participation rate, Falconer said, doesn't seem to be caused by a large population of young people starting their careers. Instead, he said that it's either people who are working past the age of 65 or people are starting to rejoin the workforce.
Soleski said she is seeing people who might have been close to retirement and decided to leave once the pandemic hit, but now, they can't "sustain themselves financially," so they're looking for part-time work.
Numbers-wise, January had more than 183,000 people employed in the Windsor CMA — the highest it's been since the onset of the pandemic, Falconer noted.
"What I think is driving that is inflation. We've seen sort of prices of everything going up really high, so what I think is happening is, perhaps there's older workers in our community who are thinking, 'maybe if I got another job with a little bit of income it might help with some of the cost pressures for my household,'" he said.
High turnover in some fields, along with people looking to go into different industries and businesses wanting to expand, are also leading to a high number of monthly job postings, Falconer said.
According to Soleski, businesses aren't realizing how many hands they're in need of.
"Companies that are calling us, it's after the fact when they're desperate, so every question we always ask is, 'when do you need these candidates?' And it's always 'yesterday,'" she said, adding that many are also looking for candidates with quite a bit of experience so that they can hit the ground running.
She's particularly seeing high demand for the health care, manufacturing and education sectors.
Fear a large employment barrier
Being in the industry during COVID-19, Soleski said she's also noticed other small shifts.
One is that fear of catching COVID-19 might be causing people to leave certain industries and be more selective with the jobs they end up accepting.
"Before the [job] barriers were language, transportation, experience, all those other things, now it's more the fear, I think that's a big barrier for more people," she said.
As well, she said they're currently managing resume gaps, where someone may have had a period of time off of work during the pandemic. Soleski said she hopes companies are more understanding of people taking time away these last few years, either to care for family or for self-care.
She also said that the pandemic spurred niche job openings that her company doesn't see all that often, such as nannies for children who were suddenly doing school at home, and dog walkers, which people needed when they were called back in to work.
"This one company had called me and said, 'I've got too many dogs, I need walkers,' and never in my life would I thought I would get a call like that," she said.
"They were kind of fun to try and find those people."