Zohra Surani wanders around a classroom-like space at the Youth Employment Services Job Camp in downtown Toronto that looks as if it hasn’t caught up with the digital age.
A poster featuring clip art of a distressed man at a phone reads, “Please make sure that you sign in at reception before viewing the job postings” in goofy Comic Sans font.
One wall is covered with dozens of sheets of paper listing jobs: Restaurant host. Camp counsellor. Tour guide. Few pay more than minimum wage, which in Ontario is $10.25 an hour.
Ms. Surani, a petite 21-year-old, is two years into her nursing degree at Hamilton’s McMaster University and has been looking for work for the past month. Maybe, she muses, she can take one of the dishwashing jobs. “I already wash dishes at home. Might as well get paid for it,” she deadpans.
Despite the sparse offerings, Ms. Surani is at least up and out, looking proactively. Naturally, the generation that lives on Facebook and can text at warp speed prefers to look for jobs online. Problem is, it’s one of the least likely places to find work.
Dominica Whittaker, a placement officer at Youth Employment Services (YES), says hunting online for jobs or posting one’s résumé on a classifieds site is the least effective job-search strategy. “There’s a [lower] success rate because everyone’s doing it,” she says.
Not only is the online job market highly competitive, she says many employers don’t post openings on the web, opting for more traditional methods (internal postings, responding to cold calls). Classified ads are a minefield, filled with pyramid schemes or other scams drafted to take advantage of desperate students.
Students face unique challenges: Most want full-time hours, but only for a few months, before they return to school. Many are working toward degrees, which they hope will gain them high-paying jobs, but they don’t qualify for positions in their fields of study yet.
For job-placement officers, the first lesson they’re teaching Gen Y is to hunt for jobs the way their parents did. And they have to do it soon: It’s mid-June already and unemployed students are feeling the heat. Last summer, the full-time employment rate for students was just 51.8 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. Placement officers at YES say there simply aren’t enough jobs to meet student demand.
Jonah Chevrier, a 19-year-old University of Toronto health sciences student, has become equally disheartened. His old employer – a clothing store – won’t hire him because they know he’ll quit at the end of the summer, he says.
He’d hoped for a gig in his field after some of his peers nabbed research jobs at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. But those opportunities are few. Most of the summer jobs YES advertises are at summer camps, in general labour or hospitality.
When Ms. Surani began her job hunt, the first thing she did was turn on her computer. Her main resource: the Government of Canada’s Job Bank. She’s fired off dozens of résumés in response to ads, but never quickly enough. “I saw an ad yesterday and called today and they said the job’s gone,” she says.
Minimum-wage jobs attract hundreds of applications, which means even the most qualified candidate can be buried under a stack of résumés that never get a second glance.
Even when Ms. Surani ventured beyond the government job boards, she didn’t go far – she replied to some listings on popular classifieds site Kijiji. She did get a job, but she was never asked to sign a contract and was put to work completing office tasks. At the end of her second day, she was told this was part of five days of unpaid training. She soon realized it was a scam. “They just get free labour out of you for five days and fire you. It’s like a revolving door.”
