A new Calgary-based company is giving employers and those looking for their first construction job a chance to connect.
OndeWork president and CEO Tony McGrath explained his company is dedicated to both answering both current labour demands and the need to give underrepresented populations access to the construction industry.
“We’re a Canadian-born social enterprise and our mission is to get people in underserved parts of our population, such as Indigenous and immigrant workers who stand ready, into the workplace,” McGrath said. “We provide a pathway for them to get into construction and other similar industries with a first step on the ladder as temporary unskilled labour.”
Recruitment and job-seeking are both centralized at ondework.com and McGrath said both paths are streamlined to make the experience as user-friendly as possible.
“As an employee, it’s basically name, address, email. They’re required to put in their bank account details and we use Stripe as a financial conduit,” he said. “Once that’s completed, we require them to go and take 30 minutes to complete the WHMIS certification online, which is free.”
The employees also indicate their availability on a week-by-week basis “so we know exactly who is available, what tickets they have and where they are.”
Employers list what kind of worker they need, pay rates and pre-authorize the day or project’s work on their credit card, McGrath said
He added the company is concentrating on unskilled and first-time workers not only to help those looking to enter the workforce but also to lighten administrative and recruitment tasks for employers.
“The industry generally has a huge challenge with recruitment. They have to place an ad, gather the resumes, do a shortlist, interviews, go through an onboarding process and then three months probation. Quite often there’s a fail rate within that that’s quite expensive and time consuming,” he said.
OndeWork, he explained, allows for a trial run with a temporary worker, to see if “they know one end of a drill from the other, if they know how to use a tape measure and whether or not they have ability in English to understand basic safety instructions.”
McGrath added in construction as well as manufacturing and warehousing, many managers and other skilled workers come from the ranks of unskilled workers.
“We provide the temporary worker and should the organization decide to hire them full-time, there’s no fee. That’s what really differentiates us from agencies and recruitment companies,” he said.
“We have no desire to hold on to them as an asset. As a temporary worker we want to provide a conduit for people to get into the industry so we don’t have a bank of workers that we maintain month after month. Our goal is to get them into full time employment and start to bridge some of the employment shortage gap that we’re seeing out there at the moment,” McGrath added.
OndeWork is also working with immigration consultants to bring workers in from other countries such as recently displaced Ukrainian citizens arriving in Canada.
“We’re working with some of the Ukrainian organizations now in Alberta, and we’ve got an influx of workers from the Ukraine that have good basic construction skills and maybe some carpentry skills, but they can’t transfer their tickets over to be a carpenter so they’re considered unskilled labour here. We’re going to be trying to get those guys to help with that first step on the ladder,” McGrath said.
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