Over the last 5 years, our success in finding high quality, loyal and productive community hires for our franchise clients has led us to ask ourselves 2 questions. First, "Why shouldn't our goal at SCP be to have every medium and large sized corporation implement a community hiring program as a fundamental part of their recruitment strategy for entry-level employees?"; and second, "What needs to change to make this happen?"

The answer to the first question is easy. This is our new aspiration. We are inspired by the possibility and the impact that would be created for job ready individuals who face employment barriers if every company adopted a community hiring approach in their hiring practices. Our challenge over the next ten years is to make this aspiration a reality.

The answer to the second question is of course much more difficult, but we believe it comes down to accomplishing two things. First of all, we have to prove the business case to employers. Instead of employers doing this for philanthropic or corporate social responsibility reasons, we believe community hiring yields numerous business benefits by enabling companies to access an untapped labour pool of more loyal and productive employees who are grateful for the opportunity they've been given. As a result of these learnings, we are now working with 3 large FP 500 customers on a community hiring pilot project (described here on our website) that we think will provide us with the hard data to prove this belief.

Second, we have to make a community hiring program much easier for companies to implement. Currently in Ontario, employment placement services for community hires are delivered through 1,200 fragmented community service agencies. That number multiplies significantly for all of Canada. That means if you are a large bank or corporation with multiple office locations across the country, you have to deal with a different community agency in every location to meet your hiring requirements. This is a very unwieldy, costly and ineffective way to find quality employees.

In the short run, as part of the community hiring pilot, we can solve this challenge by providing corporations with a single point of contact for all of their community hiring needs across multiple locations - thereby relieving them of the burden of developing separate programs at each location. In the long run (meaning the next ten years) we will work closely with community employment service organizations, the government, and other workforce solution providers to deliver a much more efficient and scalable delivery channel for corporations to participate in community hiring.

While it may take us the next ten years to accomplish these goals, we believe the end result --- hundreds of thousands of job opportunities for disadvantaged populations --- will make it all worthwhile.