O Canada!

100 InMails from the CEO to get 1 candidate on the phone.

That’s what hiring a top mid-level engineer in SF or NYC looks like for many venture-backed startups right now. Faced with this reality, six months ago a client directed us to look in Toronto instead.

The results were extraordinary. They were able to hire faster, without lowering the bar, all for 25–35% less.

Globally Competitive Talent

Canada has a large supply of talent because it admits more high-skill workers and it is home to some great schools.

1. High-Skill Immigration

From 2015–2019, Canada admitted 4x more immigrants with advanced degrees than the U.S. on a per capita basis. Canada has friendlier immigration policies than the U.S. on many fronts:

• Points-based system rather than lottery-based
• No employer sponsorship requirements
• Faster process and lower-cost pathway to residency

2. Top Schools

Canadian universities admit by program, not by school. Across the most competitive Business and STEM programs at Toronto, Waterloo, McGill, and UBC, admission rates are <10%.

Waterloo and Toronto stand apart on the technical side, with CS program admission rates between 4–6%. Toronto has a deep AI lineage: Geoffrey Hinton built his lab at Toronto, and his grad students seeded the modern industry. Alex Krizhevsky’s 2012 AlexNet paper kicked off the deep learning era, and Ilya Sutskever — another Hinton student — went on to co-found OpenAI.

More Open & Available

The response rates to outreach in Canada is materially higher. With early-career engineers who graduated from top Canadian schools, we’re seeing response rates of 30–50% vs < 10% in SF or NYC.

The core reason is there are fewer VC dollars per CS grad. There are ~10x fewer CS grads in Canada per year but almost 40x less VC funding. So compared to the U.S., in Canada, supply is outstripping demand.

Oh, Also — It’s Cheaper

Canada’s real GDP per capita has slipped from 85% of the U.S. level a decade ago to just 67% today. In practice, we’re seeing the cost of talent in Canada to be 25–35% lower than comparable folks in the U.S.

For U.S. employers struggling to compete for top talent on quality or cost — and who want to retain cultural and timezone alignment — the opportunity in Canada is big and exciting.