Willing to move for a job? Alberta might seem like the obvious place to go, but it might not be the best.
According to a new survey from Adzuna, an international job search site that recently set up shop in Canada, Saskatoon is the place to go.
The Saskatchewan city has the lowest job-seekers-to-jobs ratio in the country, according to Adzuna’s survey, with 4.4 job-seekers for every job posting.
At the other end of the spectrum is the St. Catharines-Niagara Falls, Ontario, region, with a whopping 99.9 job-seekers per job. (This number strikes us as improbably high. We’ve put in a request for comment to Adzuna about it.)
UPDATE: An Adzuna spokesperson tells us that a ratio like that is not uncommon in cities that have relied on a small number of businesses for employment, or on manufacturing, which has seen protracted declines in Canada. St. Catharines is, indeed, a traditional manufacturing base.
The spokesperson also noted that a city's job-seekers ratio can look worse if employers in that city don't use online job boards frequently. Because Adzuna looks at online placements, a city where employers place ads in the local paper would appear to have fewer jobs than it does.
Original story continues.
But if you’re a grad student, your best bet is Montreal, where “nine per cent of all advertised vacancies are for graduate positions or internships,” Adzuna notes.
Here are the best and worst cities in Canada to find a job (story continues below slideshow):
Best, Worst Places To Find A Job In Canada
There were some surprises in the survey, such as Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, ranking among the worst cities to find work. The region has become a magnet for high-tech companies, and despite the recent financial problems of its highest-profile employer, BlackBerry, the area is generally considered economically healthy. But the region has seen some jumps in its unemployment rate recently.
Adzuna measures the job-seekers-to-jobs ratio by looking at postings on web search sites like Monster and Workopolis in each of Canada’s 45 largest metro areas, and compares those to StatsCan’s numbers on unemployment filings in the same regions.
As the Globe and Mail notes, Adzuna’s survey could be the badly-needed solution to a gap in Canada’s statistics. Currently, StatsCan doesn’t break out the numbers for cities in its job vacancies survey, offering only a snapshot by province.