Cana­dian Flag on Par­lia­ment Hill

Wel­come to the “How To… Find A Job In Canada” series!

Say­ing that last year wasn’t great eco­nom­i­cally speak­ing is an under­state­ment. Pretty much all coun­tries world­wide suf­fered from the global eco­nomic down­turn and Canada was no excep­tion. Yet, a lot of peo­ple are still con­sid­er­ing mov­ing to Canada, while oth­ers are already in the process and are prob­a­bly wor­ried about whether they will get a job at all.

There is no easy answer when it comes to employ­ment. You know the story… a bit of patience, a bit of skills, a bit of luck.

I’m not a job coun­selor, and I’m not an expert. But I do know how it works in Canada and I’m hop­ing to pass along some infor­ma­tions that may not be obvi­ous to every­one. A post will be pub­lished every Sat­ur­day… enjoy!

In order to start look­ing for a job, you need 3 basics: an up-to-date resume, a cover let­ter and a few references.

The Resume

Cana­dian resumes are pretty straight­for­ward. They stress on your abil­i­ties, achieve­ments and expe­ri­ence. A resume is your busi­ness card and a mar­ket­ing tool: employ­ers usu­ally scan them fast, so you need to catch their eye.

Resumes are typ­i­cally divided into sev­eral sec­tions, but shouldn’t be more than one or two pages long.

• Con­tact infor­ma­tions: your full name, address, home and cell phone num­ber and email.
• Skills high­lights or pro­file: this is a short list of your main skills, achieve­ment or abil­i­ties (for exam­ple, I usu­ally include the fact that I’m bilin­gual since it’s pretty use­ful in Ottawa!). The high­light should tar­get the skills needed for the posi­tion your are apply­ing for.
• Edu­ca­tion: list your degrees, the schools you attended, any train­ing you may have received. Ide­ally, “trans­late” your for­eign degrees for Cana­di­ans employ­ers. If you did an offi­cial for­eign cre­den­tials assess­ment, go with that. Oth­er­wise, explain in bracket: for exam­ple, a French DEUG would be a two years uni­ver­sity degree etc.
• Work expe­ri­ence: this is obvi­ously the most impor­tant sec­tion. You can orga­nize your past expe­ri­ence chrono­log­i­cally, or you can write a func­tional resume.
• Skills: add use­ful skills, such as com­puter skills, for­eign lan­guage you mas­ter etc.
• Hob­bies and inter­ests: employ­ers do look at this sec­tion. It can give them an idea of your per­son­al­ity: for exam­ple, some­one who plays a lot of team sports could be a good team player etc.

You do not need to include a pic­ture, nor you should men­tion any per­sonal infor­ma­tions such as mar­i­tal sta­tus, reli­gion, immi­grant sta­tus in Canada, polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions etc.

Finally, be con­fi­dent when you write your resume. North Amer­i­cans are not shy about telling their employ­ers about achieve­ments and suc­cess. You should use a lot of pro-active verbs (such as “per­formed”, “achieved”, “increased”…) and refrain to men­tion any­thing negative.

Use­ful links:

• The Top Key­words Recruiters Use to Find You
• Resumes, CVs & Cover Letters
• The Resume Guide­book (PDF doc­u­ment for down­load at the bot­tom of the page)
• Monster.ca’s Resume Center

The Cover Letter

Cov­ers let­ters are very impor­tant. They should demon­strate how your skills fit the posi­tion you are apply­ing for. Don’t just describe your resume, include exam­ples and details! The cover let­ter should expand your resume’s objec­tives and impress the employer.

Okay, I know, eas­ier said than done. But the more you prac­tice, the eas­ier it gets. A nicely writ­ten cover let­ter does make a huge dif­fer­ence in your appli­ca­tion!

Use­ful links:

• Cover Let­ter Tutorial
• Cover Let­ters
• Cover Let­ters: infos to include, do’s and don’ts and samples
• Cov­er­ing Let­ter: Canada

Ref­er­ences

All in all, as far as I know, resumes and cover let­ters are pretty uni­ver­sal. Sure, you need to “cana­di­an­ize” them, but chances are you are already famil­iar with the concept.

Now, the con­cept of ref­er­ences is some­thing that totally puz­zled me when I first came to Canada. As far as I know, in Europe, no one ask for ref­er­ences, unless the posi­tion is really impor­tant. But when I first started apply­ing for jobs in Canada (yes, even for call cen­ters!), employ­ers auto­mat­i­cally assumes I could pro­vide con­tact infor­ma­tions of up to three peo­ple that could vouch for me. Need­less to say, I was pretty new to the whole thing.

A ref­er­ence is some­one who can vouch for you and can pro­vide infor­ma­tion on how you per­form in var­i­ous task, rang­ing from basic ones (“is he a team player?”) to the most pre­cise ones (“how does he per­form with…?”).

Ref­er­ences are ide­ally co-workers or employ­ers. If you are new to Canada, it’s accept­able to pro­vide ref­er­ences abroad, but be aware that some prospec­tive employ­ers don’t bother check­ing them (been there, done that…). I know, it’s a bit of a catch 22.

Ide­ally, you should always have three up-to-date ref­er­ences. Keep the names and the con­tact infor­ma­tion on a sep­a­rate sheet of paper since ref­er­ences are not listed on the resume, but pro­vided later.

Always ask people’s per­mis­sion before list­ing them as a ref­er­ence. I found it a bit awk­ward at first (okay, I still do!) but because every­body need ref­er­ences, peo­ple are used to it and usu­ally won’t mind. Pick your ref­er­ences care­fully since employ­ers do con­tact them.

Use­ful Link: How To Get And Pro­vide References

See you next week for another arti­cle on How To… Find A Job In Canada!

Related arti­cles:

1. Find­ing Job Oppor­tu­ni­ties (3÷10)
2. Canada’s Hir­ing Cul­ture (5÷10)
3. Devel­op­ing Inter­view Skills (6÷10)
4. 3 Poten­tial Career Chal­lenges (8÷10)
5. The Inter­views From Hell