Check Your LMIA Advertizing – Indeed and Workopolis are Merging!

Background

The process for an employer in Canada to seek government permission to hire a foreign worker is known as a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) application. These applications are processed by the government agency known as Service Canada.

Within this process, Canadian employers must typically first show that they have carried out certain minimum recruitment requirements. Among other criteria, ads must be placed in two separate sources (plus the Canadian job bank), for four weeks in the three month period preceding the application.

What is Changing

Two of the more popular job search web sites that are used for this purpose are (a) Indeed.com (operating in Canada as Indeed.ca) and (b) Workopolis.com.

It has been announced that Indeed (through its parent company) has purchased Workopolis. According to a pronouncement on the Workopolis home page, Indeed “will operate Workopolis.com as part of its publisher network. The site will continue to operate in a similar manner”.

It would appear as well, that this change will take effect as of April 11, 2018 (as Workopolis is advising candidates to download their resumes by that date, or they will become unavailable).

Impact

Though how this will be viewed by Service Canada is not certain, employers who are currently advertizing on both Indeed and Workopolis in anticipation of a LMIA application, must be aware of, and prepared for, the possibility that, their two sources of advertizing will be considered as one – and as such, that that they will not have met the ‘two source’ recruitment guideline.

What Employers Need to Do

As noted, it is not fully clear how Service Canada will treat LMIA applications that show Workopolis and Indeed as the two advertizing sources, but the most cautious approach for any currently running ads would be to advertise as well on a separate source, even if this sets the advertizing time frame back for a short period.

Certainly, moving forward, new ads in support of LMIA applications should be placed on two distinct sites, and this would presumably mean that Workopolis (as the ‘subsumed’ site) is no longer a viable choice for this purpose, or at the very least, that this would be taking an unnecessary risk in the LMIA process.

The information in this article is for general purposes only, and not intended as legal advice for any particular situation.