Ontario’s New Licensing Rules: Deep Dive for Recruiters

This is a unique episode that dives into Ontario's new legislation requiring recruitment firms to be licensed as of January 1, 2024. These changes will be found in Ontario's Employment Standards Act (ESA), which governs the employer-employee relationship for all provincially regulated organizations - e.g. tech companies. It appears that the main reason for implementing these new regulations is to prevent the exploitation of vulnerable foreign workers by some job recruiters. While tackling this huge problem of exploitation is applauded, the application of these new regulations was not well thought out. These changes will apply to every single recruitment agency and staffing agency that does business in the province of Ontario.

For more information about the new legislation please go to https://www.ontario.ca/page/licensing-temporary-help-agencies-and-recruiters.

This new law is generating a lot of concern in the recruitment community, notably smaller third-party recruitment agencies. The legislation is meant to tackle the exploitation problem of temporary staffing agencies that take on employee payroll of temp workers. The legislation lists several requirements, some of which are financially based. The financial requirements are causing a significant amount of backlash, and may even result in many smaller recruitment agencies going out of business.

Jeff meets with Suky Sodhi and Jessica Smith, both recruitment agency founders and operators. They are playing a lead role in sounding the alarm bell to these new legislative changes and have undertaken many activities to make a positive impact.

A petition on change.org was created and can be accessed at https://www.change.org/p/change-ontario-s-new-recruiter-law-license-policy. A new Facebook was created for concerned individuals to come together and share information - https://www.facebook.com/groups/eliteglobalrecruiters. Finally, a LinkedIn group was created called "Recruiters for Fair Licensing" - https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14289791/. If you are concerned about this new legislation in Ontario, please take the time to engage and interact with one, or all, of the online platforms.

 @CTVNews  covered this story and you can watch the clip at https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2770762.

You can find more information about Suky Sodhi at https://professionalselection.com/, and Jessica Smith at https://savantrecruitment.ca/.