Meta wants to put roots in Toronto and hire 2,500 new tech workers
By Stefan Tasevski
In late March, Meta announced that it is looking to establish headquarters in Toronto and hire 2,500 new workers in the city and across the country. The news was met with fanfare from politicians and a lot of scrutiny from tech companies, mostly because of the ongoing shortage of tech talent.
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, announced the jobs himself but also said that the move is a boon for homegrown Canadian tech talent. According to him, people don’t “have to look elsewhere to pursue their careers in tech.”
A move like this by Meta would certainly strengthen the province’s innovation sector. However, the heads of Canadian tech companies don’t like this – watching the news of another US giant stepping in and putting more “high-paying” jobs into the pipeline makes things complicated.
Currently, the talent pool in Canada is tight – the market is competitive, and recruiters are having a tough time finding new workers to fill the increase of jobs in the industry. Meta, which already has one modest shop in Toronto, Montreal, and a couple of other markets throughout the country, is just the latest major firm to consider moving to Canada and exploiting its talent pool.
In the past, we’ve seen announcements from firms like Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Reddit and Pinterest that were apparently moving to hire people from Canada and the Toronto local area. Aside from that, Toronto has an aspiring tech scene –a New York Times piece positioned the city as a top-three tech hub in North America.
At the same time, the information and communications technology (ICT) sector continues growing, with more than 855,000 people employed in it last month – an increase from 743,000 workers in the same sector in March 2020. As a result, the average hourly wage has increased from $38.23 in 2020 to $49.98 right now.
