Roy Pereira loves the startup life.
“I've worked in some big companies but I realized I've always been a startup guy,” says Mr. Pereira, president of digital media company Shiny Inc.
The realization didn't come easily to the Toronto-based technology executive who returned to Canada from Silicon Valley in 2005. Instead of his experience translating into a valuable asset for Canadian companies, he discovered it was much more difficult than he expected to find a job that allowed him to use his skills and knowledge.
“They were looking for a cookie-cutter fit,” Mr. Pereira says. “They wanted people who had worked in their specific industry, in these specific roles, and with that specific experience. They had a checklist and they weren't really willing to look beyond it. With American companies, they look at the person and their skills and aren't as concerned with industry-specific experience.”
He eventually found a job with a digital security company but he soon left to co-found a social network marketing agency.
Mr. Pereira's new company, Shiny, is his second startup since he came back to Canada. Launched last year, it just released its first product, which makes it easy for small businesses to design and deliver online ads to potential customers, which are able to easily integrate them into their properties.
His experience is not unique and Mr. Pereira is not alone in choosing to chart his own course, according to Larry Brownoff, a senior recruiting manager at the Edmonton office of international executive search firm Robert Half. A number of his clients are recently returned Canadians who have found it difficult to get back into the work force, a situation that has been compounded by the economic downturn.
“This is definitely a trend that's happening,” Mr. Brownoff says. “There simply isn't the same opportunity in Canada as there is in the U.S.”
Helping to fuel that drive: Canadian companies are particular about who they hire and the specific accreditations they hold, he notes.
“They're not in a hurry to hire and they're going to make the right hire,” Mr. Brownoff says.
As a result, many of the recently returned Canadians he deals with have launched consulting businesses that service clients primarily in the United States, Mr. Brownoff says.
Jan 28, 2010 - Couple Oshoma Momoh and Katrin Lepik returned to Canada from Seattle after working at Microsoft and in engineering, respectively. They chose to come to Toronto in part because their families are here, but also because of the quality of life. They find that support for entrepreneurs is not on par with U.S. as they work toward launching their new enterprise, but have found a community of entrepreneurs they can go to as a support network. Photo: Charla Jones/Globe and Mail
The lack of immediate access to career opportunities for Canadians such as Mr. Pereira and candidates with whom Mr. Brownoff works are the focus of a report by a Toronto group that aims to attract expatriates back to the city.
The Emerging Leaders Network (ELN) recently released results of its first survey of expatriates in San Francisco, New York and London along with respondents in Toronto. The network is an initiative of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, which gathers civic leaders to address economic and social issues facing the city and its residents.
The qualitative survey by the ELN's Homecoming working group explores factors that draw top talent to a city and keeps it there. The preliminary research report found that while people are drawn to the city's quality of life and see it as a great place to raise a family, there is a strong perception among surveyed expatriates of limited career opportunities and excessive reliance on hard-to-access professional networks in hiring.
Those themes resonate with Mr. Pereira and Mr. Brownoff.
“The Valley is the Mecca for all tech but it's a rat race, a huge rat race,” Mr. Pereira says. “I wanted a better quality of life for me and my wife. We wanted to buy a house -- down there the prices are astronomical.”
In Edmonton, Mr. Brownoff has found that his candidates are focused on regaining a certain quality of life when they return and launching a business is the furthest thing from their minds. “A lot of the time, they just want to get back home, back to family, back to their roots here in Canada.”
Statistics Canada labour force survey data suggests that more Canadians are choosing to be self-employed. The data indicates that 15.2 per cent of workers across all sectors reported as self-employed in 2001, increasing gradually by about 0.1 percentage points a year over course of the decade before levelling at around 15.5 per cent in 2005. It then jumped to an even 16 per cent between 2008 and 2009 after the downturn hit and career opportunities waned.
Contrary to personal anecdotes and much broader economic data, at least one investor disputes the notion that skilled, experienced repatriates are essentially being forced to launch new businesses due to a dearth of job prospects.
“I can't say that I've experienced this,” says Jacqui Murphy of Tech Capital Partners Inc.
Ms. Murphy, a partner at the Waterloo, Ont.-based venture capital firm, adds entrepreneurship is a natural outcome of high-quality and international work experience. “I can certainly understand how people get to a point in their career where their best option is to work for themselves,” she says. “Canadians who choose to work abroad are risk takers or looking for adventure anyway, so starting a venture would probably be more attractive to this type of person.”
