AgriJob Match helps bridge the ag labour gap

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) has developed a tool to connect job seekers and interns with agricultural employers.

AgriJobMatch.ca is a national job board for the agriculture industry that connects employers looking to fill vacancies with interested and qualified candidates. It is an aggregator which scrapes thousands of online agricultural job postings from across Canada. It offers job seekers free searches to find job postings and an application tracking system with optional registration required to build a personal profile and SkillMatch™ assessment.

SkillMatch™ is a unique process where the job applicant answers 108 questions – 37 of them standard employment questions, and the remainder are agriculturally related, so they may be better matched with available job postings. For example, the candidate may be asked if they prefer working indoors or outdoors; do they like working with animals; and so on. The SkillMatch™ then works both ways to create better pairings of workers to jobs and employers to potential workers.

“AgriJob Match was designed to attract new people to consider careers in agriculture by self-assessing their job desires and skills, and realizing how much a career in agriculture has to offer,” explains Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, Executive Director of CAHRC. “The SkillMatch feature will present job seekers with jobs they may not have considered while giving employers access to a wider net of potential applicants.” 

For employers, in addition to job postings, an optional hiring kit is available to quickly and easily guide them through the process of hiring the best possible candidate for the job. The kit includes tips and templates on how to write job descriptions and job ads, assessments, candidate tracking, an interview guide, posting management, explanations of employer legislation and obligations, and much more along with all relevant templates.

The job descriptions are based on National Occupation Standards (NOS) and competency profiles that were developed through CAHRC’s National Agricultural Occupational Framework and Labour Market Support (NAOF) research. This has created standard job descriptions and staffing tools for numerous key positions to enable Canada’s producers to use a competency-based approach to managing their human resources by making better hiring decisions, supporting training, and managing performance.

AgriJob Match can also be tailored to each commodity or region to enable interested associations to customize a version for their constituents.

The gap between labour demand and the domestic workforce in agriculture has doubled from 30,000 to 59,000 in the past 10 years and projections indicate that by 2025, the Canadian agri-workforce could be short workers for 114,000 jobs. This was a key finding of the recently released Agriculture 2025: How the Sector’s Labour Challenges Will Shape its Future research by CAHRC. The research also revealed that primary agriculture has the highest industry job vacancy rate at seven per cent.

Source: CAHRC-CCRHA