These guides exist because most recruiting advice is either too general to act on or written to sell software. Each one below is a method you can apply this month, with worked numbers, tables and checklists. They are written for owners, office managers and small HR teams at Canadian companies who do recruiting alongside everything else.
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Audit your candidate experience in one afternoon
Apply to your own job, the way a candidate would, and time everything that happens. This guide gives you the steps, a scoring sheet and the fixes that usually matter most.
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Plan next year's hiring before the requisitions arrive
Most hiring plans stop at headcount. This guide turns a headcount number into the applicants, screening hours, interview slots and calendar weeks you will need, using arithmetic you can do in a spreadsheet.
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Writing job ads that work in every province you hire in
A good job ad is short, specific and honest about the hard parts. This guide gives you a structure, a line-by-line rewrite method, and a map of the provincial posting and language rules to check before you publish.
Plan next year's hiring before the requisitions arrive
Hiring capacity planning turns a headcount target into the applicants, screening hours, interview slots and calendar weeks the hiring will actually take.
What you'll learn:
- why replacement hires can nearly double a growth plan, and how to estimate them from last year's departures
- how to reconstruct stage conversion rates from five past hires
- how to convert candidate volume into manager hours, so you can see whether the plan is realistic
- how to spot the months where several role families collide
It's the most numerical of the three, and the one to read before a budget or planning meeting.
Write job ads that work in every province you hire in
Writing job ads across Canada gives you a seven-block ad structure, a line-by-line rewrite method and a table of the provincial posting and language rules to check before publishing.
What you'll learn:
- how to open an ad with the job rather than the company
- which must-haves quietly shrink your pool
- where to find BC's and Ontario's posting guidance, Quebec's French-language obligations and Nunavut's Inuktut requirements
- how to write for a phone screen
- a pre-publication checklist
It's the one to read if you're posting a role this week.
Audit your candidate experience in one afternoon
The candidate experience audit is a five-part method: search for your company as a job seeker, read your own pages on a phone, apply to your own role, time every reply, and talk to recent hires and decliners.
What you'll learn:
- what candidates find when they search your company name
- how many steps and minutes your application really takes
- how to score findability, clarity, ease, speed, communication and close
- which fixes usually matter most, in order
It's the one to read if hiring feels slow or frustrating and you can't say why.
How the guides connect to our services
Each guide is a do-it-yourself version of part of our work. The capacity guide pairs with recruiting metrics, the job ad guide with careers site and job ads, and the audit with hiring process design. If you work through a guide and want help with the next step, the services overview explains how to choose.
A note on sources and dates
Where a guide mentions a regulation or an official program, it links the government or regulator page we read and gives the date we checked it. Rules about job postings in particular are changing across Canada, so treat every summary as a starting point: confirm with the official source and your advisors before acting. The region pages list the employment standards offices, human rights bodies and privacy regulators relevant to recruiting in each province and territory.
How to use a guide with your team
Each guide works best as a short working session rather than solo reading. Print the tables, bring one or two hiring managers and someone who schedules interviews, and fill them in with your own numbers. An hour is usually enough to finish the first pass of any of the three. Write down the three biggest gaps you find, agree who owns each one, and set a date to look again. Repeating the exercise after a quarter shows whether the changes you made had any effect.
Who writes them
The guides are written by Ali Sedighi, MBA, who leads TalentAcquisition.ca within the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group. His background is in digital marketing, conversion and automation since 2007, and the guides apply those disciplines to how candidates find, judge and choose an employer. More about him and our approach is on the about page.
Frequently asked questions
Are these guides free to use?
Yes. Read them, adapt the tables and use the checklists in your own company. We wrote them to be useful whether or not you ever work with us.
Do the guides include legal advice?
No. Where provincial or federal rules matter, we link the official source and suggest you confirm with your HR lead or employment lawyer.
Which guide should I read first?
If you're about to plan next year, start with capacity planning. If you're posting a role this week, start with job ads. If hiring feels slow and you don't know why, start with the candidate experience audit.