When it comes to unlocking the next stage of growth, nearly all business owners will say that their top priority — and often their top barrier — is access to the right people. Hiring, recruiting and retaining talent is an ongoing challenge for employers.
While this is true in any city, Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism saw an opportunity to connect employers and job seekers, taking a leadership role in the development of a central job-matching platform, Work in Manitoba. The results to date speak for themselves: more than 33,000 job seekers in Canada and 2,600 employers have registered to date, leading to more than 920 reported hires since the platform’s launch.
These numbers showcase the work of just one of many initiatives led by the Talent & Workforce Development team to help local employers get access to talent in a tightening labour market — support that can make the difference in whether a business stays, scales or chooses Winnipeg in the first place.
Bridging the gaps within the talent market
When the Talent & Workforce Development team was created in 2019, it was clear that talent was one of the biggest barriers facing Winnipeg’s private sector. When companies were weighing whether to invest in Winnipeg, one of the first questions they asked Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism staff was whether the region had the right people to fill their staffing needs.
Talent supply exists in Manitoba, from post-secondary institutions to employment agencies and settlement organizations, but it is decentralized and challenging for an employer to access in full.
“The ecosystem that provides talent was fragmented, and to be honest, it still is,” says Alberto Velasco-Acosta, Vice President, International of Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism. “Businesses didn’t know who to call.”
The team’s answer was not to become just another provider, but to act as the connective tissue between all layers: a single, friendly point of access to a complicated system.
“We wanted to improve the user experience of connecting to that ecosystem,” Velasco-Acosta says. “The centrepiece of everything we do is the Manitoba employer.”
More efficient access to Manitoba’s talent pool
For Ashley Dunlop, who joined the Talent & Workforce Development team as Director in 2024, the strategy comes down to solving a long-standing industry pain point: people without jobs, and jobs without people.
“Our job is to make those connections — between people who are ready, people who are almost ready and just need a little support to get there, and employers for whom talent is absolutely critical,” says Dunlop. “People are at the heart of operations. If you don’t have someone to open the doors, the doors stay closed.”
The primary tool used to solve this gap is the Work in Manitoba job-matching platform, which is free to use, provincially funded and administered by Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism.
“I like to think of it as Manitoba’s talent pool,” Dunlop says. “That’s what we’re trying to do — collect it and make the match.”
Now in its fifth year, the team can track hires directly: a quick prompt asks employers whether they filled a role, and whether Work in Manitoba helped them do so. A strong majority say yes. What sets the platform apart is a focus on quality over volume.
“You might get fewer applicants than you would on Indeed or LinkedIn,” says Dunlop. “But they’re eligible to work in Canada, they actually want to be in Manitoba and their skills match the job posting.”
The result is a pool of applicants who have more substance, and a more efficient application-vetting process. As a result, employers find that a posting on Work in Manitoba converts to the right hire at a markedly higher rate than other platforms.
This platform has helped companies such as Canada Life, who in 2025 had an opportunity in place to launch an accessibility-focused mentorship program but couldn’t find the right audience to reach.
“We were able to message exactly the people in our talent pool who identified with a disability and were interested in finance,” says Dunlop. “It was incredibly successful; we were told that their Manitoba event ended up being the most successful across all of Canada Life’s offices for turnout.”
Moving beyond our borders
Another key team initiative is its recruitment missions, where the Talent & Workforce Development team will work with Manitoba-based companies to identify key positions that are difficult to fill locally.
In recent years, these missions have found themselves in multiple international markets including the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Argentina — as well as key domestic markets such as the GTA and Calgary, where the team connects with job seekers and former Winnipeggers who may be ready to take a second look at the career and lifestyle advantages Winnipeg offers.
One such mission took place in 2023 to Morocco, which directly helped Avenir IT, a fully bilingual technology service provider (and Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism supplier), to grow its team capacity. They needed to recruit senior-level IT talent who were operationally fully bilingual — a narrow talent pool on two fronts and difficult to find in Winnipeg’s existing talent pool.
With an international recruitment mission led by Destination Canada taking place, Avenir IT saw an opportunity to participate and recruit the talent they needed. In this instance, Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism helped the company with coordinating logistics, candidate screening, interview facilitation and immigration pathways alignment to help smooth the path to Manitoba residency. As a result, the company filled several key senior roles that remain based in Winnipeg today.
Looking ahead — and abroad
Since the Talent & Workforce Development function was established in 2019, the team has worked with companies to address talent shortages by helping them find talent within Manitoba and supporting targeted international recruitment.
The broader economic payoff for these initiatives go beyond individual companies and into the broader community. In particular, senior international hires will often emigrate with their families — often with the spouse also finding work, children entering local schools and overall growing the tax base long-term.
The pursuit of talent attraction and retention goes beyond just the vacancies of today’s job market, but also the ones coming next. The Talent & Workforce Development team seeks to help Manitoba stay competitive as industries and technologies shift — a key part of retaining the people and companies who are driving industry sectors forward with new innovations and technology.
To help with that retention and growth strategy, Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism develops and monitors targeted, high-performing marketing campaigns to tell Winnipeg and Manitoba’s story — not just to the rest of the world, but also to those of us who already live and work here. Speaking more directly about Winnipeg and Manitoba’s career advantages counters the myth that you have to leave the province to build a great career — and also reminds those who did leave what’s waiting for them at home.
Seven years into the team’s founding, Talent & Workforce Development is hard at work connecting the dots. The platform they administer is delivering jobs matches, employers are finding the right talent and a once-fragmented ecosystem is becoming something closer to a network.
Even with these multiple wins, the team knows there’s still a long road ahead — but for a city that competes for talent around the world, that work is only just hitting its stride.
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Need support finding talent? Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism provides in-depth Talent Needs Assessments focused on evaluating skilled talent retention, recruitment and other challenges. Get in touch with our Talent & Workforce Development team today to start the conversation: talent@winnipegedt.com.
