Connecting newcomers with jobs

Born and raised in Dartmouth, N.S., Webb speaks tenderly about the City of Lakes where she also watched her kids grow up and paddle for sport.

But the depth of that fondness was cemented earlier, when she left for a short time in the early 1980s. She was newly graduated and moved to Lethbridge, Alta., where her husband was going to school.

Despite the business degree to her name, she struggled to find work.

It was a relief to return home to Nova Scotia after a year, where she started her career in earnest and put down roots.

She says that over the years she’s been offered jobs in other cities, but always turns them down.

It’s atypical for Maritimers to resist moving west.

In the past few years, only an influx of international immigration has prevented Nova Scotia’s population from decreasing.

Webb says in a city like Halifax, in a province like Nova Scotia, where the population is aging and many industries are desperate for skilled workers, someone has to show people it’s viable to stay before they’re tempted to try their luck in another part of the country.

There’s a “small window” to attach people to the city, according to Webb, before necessity or ambition pull them away.

She’s made it a personal mission to attach as many people as possible to her hometown by settling them into meaningful work.

With the initial success of the program for immigrants, Webb started thinking about how other groups could fit into her mandate.

New graduates are often in a similar position to newcomers: unattached, and eagerly looking for work.

So within a year of launching the immigrant stream of the connector program, Webb invited international graduates to join.

Within a couple more years, a third stream was added for local graduates.

Bo Qin says without Webb’s program, it isn’t likely she would still be in Halifax.

She came here from China to study internetworking. After completing a master’s degree in 2016, she had all the right qualifications on paper — just like Rajendran — but soon found herself working part-time as a restaurant server.

“I just dropped resumés online and even dropped paper resumés in a company at the front desk, but it didn’t work,” she says.

As months went by, she started getting anxious.

A year had already passed since she graduated and Qin worried if she couldn’t find a job before her three-year work permit expired, she’d have to return to China.

Qin grew up in Shanghai — a city of about 24 million people — and says its vast size, the size of companies there and the fast pace of work and life were unappealing to her. “I prefer Halifax,” she says.

It was ISANS — the immigrant settlement agency — that referred Qin to the connector program last year.

Her first connector worked for a cybersecurity consultancy firm and recommended Qin sign up for a program to learn more computer languages. While she was in the midst of those studies this spring, the company her connector worked for started hiring.

Qin was thrilled to receive a call — and a job offer.

Ignoring for a moment the year of waiting and worrying, Qin’s hiring seems about as easy as can be — no cover letter, no formal interview, just a plum offer. But it was only because of the connection she’d made, and she doesn’t forget that.

Webb says the sooner one can start networking, the better. Which is why she’s now working on accepting immigrants into the program before they even arrive in Canada.

“When they get off the plane, they probably have three people to follow up with,” she says.

As Webb continues to push the boundaries of the program (next on the horizon is a connector app), more and more communities are taking notice.

She now spends a good amount of her time sharing the process nationally and internationally because she knows the challenges she sees in Halifax are universal.