Heads Up, Americans and Expats: 3+ Wants You
MONCTON – 3+ Corporation, the economic development corporation for Dieppe, Moncton and Riverview, has launched a new campaign to attract American workers to the area to fill what it says are more than 700 available jobs.
3+ will be reaching out via social media campaigns and at job fairs in New York City, Boston and San Francisco to promote jobs in the Greater Moncton area in fields such as IT, nursing, trucking, business and finances.
Keri Alberts is the vice-president of workforce recruitment and retention with 3+. She says that the corporation is taking a proactive approach to bringing more people into the community. She adds that even with their efforts to fill the jobs locally, many positions go unfilled.
“We’re a victim of our own little success so we have all kinds of jobs and we have people but we don’t have a whole lot of connections,” Alberts said.
Alberts says most of the jobs being promoted elsewhere by 3+ have been promoted locally first through job fairs and cooperation with local colleges, universities and career counsellors.
“We’ve thought about the U.S. market for a long time, but with the recent election we thought ‘you never know. there might be some disenfranchised people that are there and would love to come and live with us.’ We have the lowest cost of living here in Canada. A lot of those things led to that looking for people in the U.S. It’s kind of a pilot for us at this point in time.”
The campaign officially launched Thursday and is set to run from December 2016 to March 2017.
Alberts says that the campaign is part of efforts to look ahead at the community’s future. She adds that with an aging population and much of the workforce going into retirement, the need to fill jobs will only increase.
“As our population ages, we’re really looking forward for the next five years, not even so much as right now, but for the next few years when the managers and the CEOs will be retiring.”