Placement services to link jobs, Native candidates

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Aboriginal Choice Placement Services hopes to link businesses searching for Aboriginal job candidates with professionals and skilled workers looking for employment.

"This is a prime example of Aboriginal self-empowerment. Developed with Aboriginal expertise, it demonstrates how a targeted employment equity group can seize an opportunity and turn it not only to its own advantage, but the advantage of corporate Canada as well," said Patrick, Lavelle, Chairman of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, the services' founder.

"Through these services, Aboriginal people will wind up with excellent jobs, and Canadian employers will wind up with first-rate people."

Ontario's employment equity bill, scheduled for third reading this fall, will force businesses to hire women and people from minority groups to more fairly reflect the composition of Canadian society. Lavelle said businesses would be better off to begin the hiring now, before being forced to by government.

"While the Ontario legislation is in some of its direction Draconian, it will be copied by other provinces and governments because of the pressures being brought to bear by those groups who have not succeeded in getting their fair share of jobs," Lavelle told a group of business representatives at the program's launch last month.

The pool of educated Aboriginal candidates is growing. Some 120,000 Canadian Aboriginals have post-secondary education and the number has been doubling every five years, he said. In 1976, there were 2,100 Natives in colleges, universities and technical schools. In the 1992-93 school year, that number had grown to 21,500.

Canadian business can' afford to ignore the skills among minorities or the fact minority customers want to be served by a workforce that represents them, Heather Connelly, executive recruiter and principal at Pat Marwick Stevenson & Kellogg, told the meeting.

Aboriginal people have the highest percentage of young people and are the fastest-growing population in Canada, she said.

Aboriginal Choice Placement Service was developed by Travis Seymour, a Mohawk from the Akwesasne Reserve, Ont. The ACPS provides a range of applicant searches, including the Executive Search and Professional Placement Services, which matches corporate employers with Native management candidates, and the Direct Referral Service, which focuses on placing temporary, clerical and skilled workers.

The Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business is a national nonprofit organization that brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people for mutually beneficial partnerships in employment, education, networking and business ventures.