A Testimonial: Working With Internationally Trained Professionals is a Rewarding Management Experience
Over the course of my career, I’ve relied on a network of University and PWC alumni colleagues and friends for help with hiring, career progression for ourselves and our mentees. Many of us coach and mentor youth finishing university degrees and also advocate for finance and accounting professionals who are newcomers to Canada. Within this group, many of our parents (or in some cases we ourselves) went through the experience of being new to Canada and having to restart established professional careers. We love to create first professional opportunities for youth and also for new immigrants to Canada. This practice of mentoring others has also helped all of us fill vacancies in our teams and hire great talent.
In one of these settings, I expressed a need to hire contract staff. My good friend introduced me to WoodGreen. She mentioned she had volunteered her time at WoodGreen earlier and had been impressed by the caliber of candidates and the level of training and mentorship offered to them by WoodGreen’s professional programs. I contacted the organisation and received several great profiles for hire and the rest of it is now history!
WoodGreen was very attentive to my hiring needs. My contact Nadjib, an employment consultant at WoodGreen, helped identify key areas of focus for the roles. He also helped me understand the profile of individuals who were available for hire. I met with Nadjib shortly after receiving several profiles to discuss partnering opportunities with WoodGreen and found him to be a great advocate for the community of job seekers that he represented.
Candidates who we hired at WoodGreen have received a lot of coaching and mentoring on the topic of working within the Canadian corporate sector. While English was not the first language of the individuals who I hired from there, they were all well versed in business communication thanks to the WoodGreen program. These candidates were more in tune with the Canadian work culture than other new immigrants who I had worked with in my career.
WoodGreen’s representative made it easy for me to understand the profile of the candidates who we were considering. They highlighted key strengths and development areas for each candidate which helped me optimize training and onboarding for the candidates we chose. There was no cost to using their service which was another bonus given the recruitment fees for trained professionals can be quite high.
I highly recommend WoodGreen as an efficient source of hiring.
Working with internationally trained professionals is a rewarding management experience. Many professionals come to Canada having fine-tuned their trade. Especially in the accounting and finance realm, many of the foreign designations and qualifications can translate easily into our Canadian hiring needs. Most foreign professionals are eager to obtain a first role in Canada and once obtaining it, they are incredibly open to coaching and development. This has been a key positive for me as a hiring manager because the combination of well-developed technical skillsets and open-ness to coaching on soft skills development often creates a great employee-employer relationship.
Saeideh Fard, CPA-CA, CPA (IL) Chief Financial Officer, Traveledge
