The Sarnia-Lambton Workforce Development Board (SLWDB) hopes to understand why the local unemployment rate has dropped and what resources could benefit employers through its latest survey.
The 2023 Employer One survey is currently available and will remain open until January 31, 2023.
Executive Director Laura Greaves said many of the questions are similar to previous years but with a few exceptions.
"This is our 10th year running the survey which is very exciting! We are hoping to have 326 local businesses and organizations take part in the survey," said Greaves. "The format of the survey has not changed considerably this year from last year, other than we didn't include COVID questions."
New questions have also been incorporated into the survey to ask if employers are hiring newcomers, international students, and internationally trained professionals. If so, Greaves said they're also asking if the above demographic is being hired as permanent full-time staff, part-time staff, or co-op students.
Three hundred businesses and organizations participated in last year's survey, which surpassed the SLWDB's goal of 295 survey respondents.
"We know that this is not representative of the entire Sarnia-Lambton business community. This is really just a very small snapshot of the about 10,000 businesses that we have in the county," said Greaves. "So in no way would we say this is representative of all businesses but this is really our best local snapshot of what is going on in the business community."
Greaves said the more responses they receive through the survey, the better they can understand what is going on in the community in regard to recruitment, retention, skills gaps, training requirements, and community support.
Results from the survey are expected to be released in March 2023.
"This year, I expect the results to look a little different and that's because this year, the labour force has looked very, very different than it has in years past. So when we look even to last year when we ran the survey, the pandemic was still -- I think -- front of mind for many people and the unemployment rate was much higher," Greaves said. "This past year, especially looking into the summer months, the unemployment rate has been very low. What we have heard anecdotally from so many employers is the struggle that they've had to fill positions."
Greaves said the need to fill positions, especially in the summer, was evident through the SLWDB's job board.
According to local statistics, Sarnia-Lambton's unemployment rate in 2022 dipped to its lowest point at 4.3 per cent in June. (Data from October to December 2022 was not available at the time of publication.) In 2021, the lowest unemployment rate was seen in September at 6.9 per cent.
"In the time that I've been here -- and even in the time that we've run the survey, the unemployment rate had never been this low. Employers had never struggled to fill positions in the same way," said Greaves. "So we're very interested to see what employers are seeing, what other supports they would like to see to help them fill those positions, and once again this is one of the reasons why we thought it would be important to ask these questions about hiring newcomers."
Greaves said the survey is short and takes an average of eight minutes to complete.
