How Weak Recruitment Evidence Stalled a Work Permit for Months

The situation

Kajan had spent nine years working in warehouse operations in Guyana, most recently supervising inbound receiving for a shipping distributor. When a mid-sized logistics company near Belleville advertised for a warehouse operations lead, a role that involved coordinating shift schedules, inventory counts, and a small team, he applied, interviewed twice by video call, and received a written job offer with a start date roughly four months out. The pay was well above what he earned in Guyana, and the role was skilled enough that the employer would need government approval before Kajan could be issued a work permit to fill it.

That approval is called a Labour Market Impact Assessment, or LMIA, issued by the federal government department responsible for the labour market. Before a Canadian employer can hire a foreign worker for most positions, it generally has to show that it tried to recruit a Canadian citizen or permanent resident first and could not fill the role. Only once a positive LMIA is in hand can the foreign worker apply for the actual work permit. The employer, not Kajan, is the one who applies for the LMIA, which put Kajan in the position of watching his own future depend on paperwork he could not see or control.

Kajan's spouse, Valentina, worked as a bookkeeper for a small accounting office in Georgetown. She had begun quietly asking her employer about a longer resignation notice period and was researching schools, on the assumption the family would be settled near Belleville within six months. Neither of them had reason to expect trouble. The employer had used an immigration consultant before, for a different hire, and assured Kajan the process was routine.

What went wrong

Roughly ten weeks after the job offer, the employer told Kajan its LMIA application had been refused. The government's recruitment requirements are specific about how a job has to be advertised before a foreign worker can be brought in: the posting generally needs to run for a minimum period, appear on the national job bank, and be advertised through at least a couple of other recruitment methods appropriate to the occupation, with the employer keeping records of who applied and, if a Canadian applicant was rejected, a genuine business reason why.

The consultant the employer had engaged, Mateo, had posted the role for barely two weeks on a single low-cost job board before pulling it down, well short of what the process expects, and had kept almost no documentation of the two Canadian applicants who did apply beyond a one-line note that they were not suitable. When the government reviewer looked at the file, the recruitment effort read as a formality rather than a genuine attempt to hire locally, and the application was refused. Refused LMIA applications are not always fatal to a job offer, but they cannot simply be appealed on the same facts; a fresh, properly documented recruitment process generally has to start over.

Kajan first learned how serious this was when the employer's HR contact told him, almost in passing, that they were reconsidering the position given the setback. He reached out to our office directly the same week, worried that a job offer, a planned move, and a spouse's résumé built around it were about to unravel over paperwork he had never seen. He had no formal role in the employer's LMIA application and no way to fix it himself, but he needed to understand what could realistically still be done, how long it might take, and what he should tell Valentina.

The practical problem was twofold. First, a second recruitment attempt done properly would take real time, likely two to three months once advertising, interviews, and documentation were factored in, on top of the ten weeks already spent. Second, nothing prevented the employer from deciding, partway through a second attempt, that filling the role locally was easier than persisting with a foreign hire, particularly if the delay dragged on. Kajan needed the recruitment file rebuilt correctly, quickly, and in a form that would hold up to scrutiny the second time.

What we did

1. Reviewed the refusal letter and the original recruitment file. The refusal set out exactly which requirements the first attempt had failed to meet, so the first step was confirming precisely what a corrected application needed to show, rather than guessing at what had gone wrong or repeating the same mistakes under time pressure.
2. Explained to Kajan what he could and could not influence. Because the LMIA is the employer's application, we were direct with Kajan about the limits of what we could do on his behalf: we could not file the employer's paperwork for them, but we could advise him on what a compliant process looks like so he could raise informed questions with the employer's HR contact instead of relying on secondhand reassurances.
3. Set out the recruitment requirements in plain terms for the employer to follow. At Kajan's request, we prepared a short written summary of what the recruitment process needed to include, the minimum advertising period, the required posting locations, and the documentation standard for any Canadian applicants who were screened out, which the employer's HR contact used to run the second attempt properly rather than through the same consultant.
4. Advised on maintaining Kajan's position during the wait. With months of uncertainty ahead, we reviewed whether Kajan held any status in Canada that needed attention, confirmed his passport and supporting documents would remain valid through a realistic timeline, and flagged that he should not make irreversible commitments, resigning his own job in Guyana, for instance, until a positive LMIA was actually in hand.
5. Prepared Kajan's work permit application in parallel. Rather than waiting for the LMIA outcome before starting any work, we assembled Kajan's supporting documents, employment history, and application materials in advance, so that once a positive LMIA issued, his work permit application could go in immediately instead of adding further delay on top of the recruitment restart.
6. Checked in with Kajan through the wait. Because the timeline was genuinely uncertain and largely out of his hands, we gave Kajan realistic estimates at each stage rather than false reassurance, so he and Valentina could make decisions, about her notice period, about their savings, with an honest picture of the risk still on the table.

The outcome

The employer's second recruitment effort, run properly this time, took about ten weeks from posting to a completed file: a full advertising period across the required platforms, genuine interviews of the Canadian applicants who came forward, and documented, defensible reasons for the hiring decision. The corrected LMIA application was approved. Kajan's work permit application, already prepared, was submitted the same week and was processed within the normal several-month range for a straightforward, well-documented file.

From the original job offer to Kajan actually starting work, close to eight months had passed, roughly four months longer than the original timeline the employer had first given him. That gap was not free. Kajan's warehouse income in Guyana was modest, and the family drew down a meaningful portion of their savings during the wait, an amount in the range of what many single-income households in their position would consider several months' worth of lost income and living costs. Valentina delayed her resignation and kept working through the uncertainty, which softened the impact but meant months of stress neither of them had planned for.

The job offer itself never fell through, and the work permit was ultimately approved without further complication. That is the honest outcome here: the underlying application was fixed, the family's plan survived, but the cost of the first consultant's shortcuts landed on Kajan and Valentina, not on the employer or the consultant who created the problem. There was no path to recovering the lost months or the drawn-down savings; the best available outcome was making sure the second attempt did not repeat the first one's mistakes.

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