Integration through education

Improving the integration experience for immigrants is a win for everyone. Helping newcomers get settled faster and more easily in to the Canadian landscape means they have a positive experience and it also means they are contributing sooner to the economy, culture and social fabric.

Newcomers to Canada are one of the diverse groups we serve, thus integration and settlement issues are important to us at TalentOyster. We have several programs in place to help bridge settlement gaps where we can.

One of the topics you'll hear when discussions of integration and settlement come up is learning more about Canada. Canadians want new immigrants to be knowledgeable about the country. The government, and the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, speak of the education of newcomers in Canadian history, culture and values as an essential part of the settlement process. And most of all newcomers themselves have a strong thirst for knowledge about the country that has become their new home. New immigrants do feel a sense of obligation to the country that has accepted them, but pragmatically as well they understand that knowing more about the history of the country helps them to understand the country today, and ultimately be more successful.

So in this line we're very proud to help announce The Canadian Experience : A Civic Literacy Project for the New Mainstream, a 52 week series of columns, written and edited by some of Canada's leading historians and authors, with information about Canadian history, culture and experience. The Canadian Experience is a project of our parent company (Multimedia Nova Corporation) and is being published through our nation-wide partner network of in-language news-media. We at TalentOyster are excited at being part of a project that can help the people we serve more than just helping them find a job. We believe that giving people the educational tools to help them help themselves helps build a stronger country for everyone.

Besides the columns there are other interesting and fun things on the site. You can read more about the series and the authors, find links to history resources and test your history knowledge with the The Canadian Experience Quiz. And last but not least you can find The Canadian Experience on Facebook.

So come check out the site and the series, let us know what you think and be sure to tell your friends. This project is one of the ways in which we are working to improve the integration and settlement process for new Canadians but more education about the history of our country is, we think, a good thing for everyone.

Introducing TalentOyster Campus

We're pleased to announce the launching of a new Beta feature of our site, TalentOyster Campus. As the name implies, this section of the TalentOyster site is geared towards students.

In it's initial setup TalentOyster Campus is a job board that features just student suitable jobs and intern postings. We will be expanding TalentOyster Campus over time, adding content speaking to the needs and issues of international students as well as newcomers who are looking to get their Canadian careers on the right path. Eventually we hope to have enough interest to justify splitting TalentOyster Campus into two micro-sites, one focused on students and another on interns. But we think our current start is an important step in the right direction of having specific content, features and jobs focused on the needs of these groups.

Be sure to check it out and tell us what you think.

Additionally non-profit agencies who have internships available should contact us regarding having them posted on TalentOyster Campus.

Our Press page

Our site has a new Press page where you can find press/media related materials. On this page you can find

• a list of our press releases (in PDF format)


• links to various articles, interviews and stories about TalentOyster by news organizations


• the contact information for media inquiries

If you know of an online property that has covered TalentOyster that we don't have listed please let us know

We were on CBC Radio

TalentOyster was covered in a CBC Radio One news piece on Sunday March 14th. The topic was increasing hiring, and the increased diversity hiring expected by Canadian employers over the remainder of the year.

This is a follow up on our press-release about the survey we recently ran on diversity hiring. We had a better than expected response from HR and recruiting persons from across the country and the results were pretty positive for those looking for work.

You can listen to a clip of the piece including a brief excerpt of an interview with TalentOysters very own John Sutton on our site

Canadian Organizations Want to Hire More Diverse Candidates

From the TalentOyster press release:

71% say they’ll increase diversity hiring this year

The official unemployment rate may be holding steady, but most Canadian recruiters are seeing a marked uptick in demand for candidates – and it's renewing their interest in recruiting candidates from diversity groups such as visible minorities and recent immigrants, according to a new survey by TalentOyster.com.

See the full press release on our site here

TalentOyster JobBadge Customizer

So following up on previous posts about the TalentOyster JobBadge we've created a simple page to help you create custom badges yourself.

Just to recap quickly the TalentOyster JobBadge lets's you display a real-time, auto-refreshing, widget-list of current opportunities on TalentOyster on your site. You can see the badge in action on the right of this blog.

Now this page wil help you create your own badge. Just set a few configuration buttons to choose your badge size, language, colours and number of jobs and click a button and you'll be able to see a preview of your job badge. Also the source code you need for integrating the badge on to your site is automatically generated for your custom badge and you can just copy and paste it right into your site.

So check out the customizer at http://www.talentoyster.com/servlets/TalentOysterBadge

Did you know? Tweeting about Jobs

Did you know you can find out about the latest jobs posted on TalentOyster via Twitter?

TalentOysterJob is a Twitter account that tweets about the most recent jobs posted on TalentOyster. We updated this blog as well and you can see the Twitter feed for TalentOysterJob on the right side of this page, which gives a feel about how it works.

It's also a good place to meet the recruiters, hiring managers, etc from our diverse employers. TalentOysterJob only follows the twitter accounts used by our employers so you can see the follower list for more.

TalentOysterJob is mainly automated so if you're looking for discussion on diversity via Twitter you should check out the TalentOyster Twitter account instead.