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Canada has recovered all of the roughly 3 million jobs lost to Covid-19.

According to Statistics Canada, our country’s economy added 157,100 jobs in September, returning the labor market to pre-pandemic levels, exceeding economists’ expectations of 60,000 new jobs.

It’s welcome news for the nation’s economy. The numbers confirm that companies are eager to hire workers as COVID restrictions ease and growing vaccination rates boost optimism among consumers and businesses.

The jobs are there. Now, we just need the people.

For the second time in as many decades, Saskatoon businesses are facing a labour crunch. In virtually every sector of our economy, the search is on for new people or to onboard those who were let go at the height of the pandemic in 2020.

We are in good company. A report released in September provides additional evidence, with more than 60 per cent of Canadian businesses saying that widespread labour shortages are limiting their growth.

The report, produced by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), combines the findings of two surveys - one that polled 1,251 Canadian entrepreneurs in May 2021 and a survey of 3,000 Canadian employees conducted in June 2021. Its findings suggest 49 per cent of business owners have had to delay or have been unable to deliver orders to clients due to a lack of labour.

It also says many small- and medium-sized business owners report job vacancies sitting empty for three or four months at a time, with 61 per cent saying they've had to increase their own hours or their employees' work hours as a result.

While businesses report trouble finding workers as the economy fully reopens, the province is preparing a multi-million-dollar program it hopes will help fill the shortage.

Jeremy Harrison, Saskatchewan’s Minister of Trade and Export Development, announced this summer, that the provincial government announce initiatives worth more than $10 million to help integrate underrepresented groups into the labour market. The primary training partners would be Saskatchewan Polytechnic and Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade.

This will be welcome news to construction, manufacturing and industrial employers who are hungry for labour and risk facing cancelled jobs. But what about other sectors where good people are in short supply?

Some have speculated that the labour challenge in our hospitality sector, for instance, where hourly jobs are the norm, workers are simply choosing to stay home and draw from COVID benefit programs that pay more.

Others have suggested that many workers used the pandemic to retrain, switch industries or re-evaluate their career paths.

Still others point to restrictions on international travel and border crossings where the flow of foreign workers and skilled professionals has all but dried up.

Whatever the case, Saskatoon hasn’t seen a labour shortage like the one we’re experiencing since “the boom” over a decade ago. Those of us who were around then – scrapping, poaching, incentivizing, and drafting talent by any means necessary – remember too well the challenges of high-growth and low labour supply. The opportunity to grow was sitting right there. The only thing missing were the people to go get it.

Enter 2022 and Saskatoon’s post-COVID economic world where, in many sectors, the opportunities extend beyond “recovery” and point to real opportunities for growth. Look no further than BHP’s plans to operationalize the first phase of its Jansen potash project by 2027. It is expected to create around 3,500 jobs annually during construction plus more than 600 jobs at the mine site and corporate office in Saskatoon. The potash is there. Mining for talent may be the biggest challenge.

So what can be done?

Inside this issue, we’ve enlisted the big brains of industry experts, and profiled the Jason Aebig, CEO Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce

best practices of local companies, who are working to figure it out. The strategies they describe fall on a spectrum between “building talent” from within (developing a strong pipeline of people to drive the organization) and “buying talent” from the outside (where a combination of hard and soft incentives attract people from competitors and the job market).

For many of you, the strategy will fall somewhere in between, where you’re taking a fresh look at hard incentives like wages, benefits and workplace set-up, and softer enticements like company culture, brand and values.

Whatever the case, one thing is clear: the war for talent is back on and after 21 months of economic uncertainty, rotating lay-offs and stagnant hiring in many sectors, Saskatoon is gearing up to grow again.