J.D. Irving is a privately owned family company with over 18 000 employees. Company has operations both in Canada and USA with business units in various sectors, agriculture, transportation and forestry to name a few. To find qualified employees in the forestry sector, J.D. Irving trusts international recruitment. In Finland, Eilakaisla has helped the company to find and recruit top experts in the field.
“We do a lot of international recruitment as there is a shortage of forest machine operators in Canada. The need for foreign experts has actually grown over the years. Earlier we used to do a number of trips to Finland but then COVID-19 hit and we were not able to travel to Finland. At that point we really needed to find a recruitment partner who would help us to find the right employees”, says International Recruitment Manager Dave Corbett.
J.D. Irving has decided to invest in the recruitment of Finns because in addition to Sweden, Finland is a world leader in forestry. With the help of Eilakaisla’s experts, J.D. Irving has succeeded in creating attractive candidate marketing and recruiting qualified staff from Finland.
“Eilakaisla has acted as our face in Finland and we have agencies similar to Eilakaisla in many other countries around the world. Eilakaisla has helped us to attract the attention of Finnish forest machine operators with skilled marketing activities which has facilitated our recruitment”, Dave says.
For J.D. Irving, acquiring employees from Finland is a long and complex process that requires a significant amount of resources. As a professional recruitment partner, Eilakaisla takes care of the whole recruitment process starting from candidate marketing all the way to hiring the best employees.
“Our cooperation model is very simple. Eilakaisla does the pre-screening as they know what we need both from a business and immigration perspective. We also did an advertising plan together with Eilakaisla to attract professionals in the field. Eilakaisla has a lot of expertise in the field of marketing and they know how to implement it successfully. In our experience recruitment is quite challenging because there are not many Finns who would be willing to move to Canada”, Dave adds.
According to Dave, the cooperation has been easy since Eilakaisla has strong recruitment and staffing expertise regardless of industry. With the help of Eilakaisla, six Finnish forest machine operators have already seized the opportunity to work and live in Canada.
“I hope that we will get from 5 to 10 employees from Finland every year. In our experience, moving to Canada has been an excellent experience, especially for young Finns. I would definitely recommend Eilakaisla to any company either internationally or domestically. If you have a need for talent and that talent can be found in Finland, they are the right partner for you”, Dave sums up.
