Building Recruitment Evidence That Passed a Family's LMIA

The situation

Tarek had spent nine years as a customer service supervisor in Kenya before a call-centre operator based in Oshawa offered him a position answering and routing customer inquiries for a Canadian telecommunications client. The pay was modest by Canadian standards but represented a significant step up for the family, and the employer was willing to sponsor the move. The problem was that the job required what is called a Labour Market Impact Assessment, or LMIA — a document issued by the federal government confirming that hiring a foreign worker will not negatively affect the Canadian labour market, and that no qualified Canadian or permanent resident was reasonably available for the role. Without a positive LMIA, Tarek could not apply for the work permit that would let him take the job.

His wife Winnie, a hairdresser who had run her own small styling business back home, and their daughter Fiona would come with him — Winnie on an open work permit available to spouses of certain work permit holders, and Fiona on a study permit while she finished secondary school in Ontario. Everything depended on the employer's application clearing the labour market test first. The employer's HR coordinator had handled the recruitment steps herself, believing the process was mostly paperwork, and reached out to Tarek's family only after the file was largely assembled and ready to submit.

What the recruitment file was missing

When Tarek asked Treadstone to review the employer's draft application before it went in, the trouble became clear within an afternoon. To support an LMIA, an employer generally has to advertise the position for a minimum period across specific channels — often including the national employment platform designated by the government, plus at least two other recruitment methods suited to the type of job — and keep records showing genuine, good-faith efforts to hire domestically first. The employer had posted the job, but the ad ran on only one platform, used a job title that did not match what appeared anywhere else in the file, and was live for barely half of what a reviewer would expect to see for a legitimate recruitment effort.

Worse, four Canadian applicants had actually applied during the posting window. The HR coordinator had screened them by phone, decided none were suitable, and moved on — without writing down why. That is one of the most common ways an LMIA application gets refused: not because the employer did anything improper, but because the file cannot show, in writing, a legitimate business reason each domestic candidate was passed over. A reviewer at Employment and Social Development Canada, the department that assesses these applications, cannot take an employer's word for it after the fact. If the reasoning is not documented at the time, it is treated as though it never happened.

There was a second issue sitting underneath the first. The wage offered on the posting was noticeably lower than what the job actually paid once shift premiums were factored in, which risked the application being flagged for offering below the prevailing wage for the occupation and region — another common ground for refusal, since the wage on file has to match what the worker will actually be paid.

What we did

1. Assessed whether the existing recruitment effort could be salvaged. We reviewed the posting dates, platforms, and wage against current program requirements and concluded the recruitment period fell short by several weeks and used only one qualifying platform instead of the required mix. Rather than submit a file likely to draw a refusal, we recommended the employer restart the recruitment clock properly.
2. Worked with the employer to rebuild the job posting. We advised on consistent job titles and duties across every platform, a posting period that met the required minimum, and a wage that matched what Tarek would actually be paid, shift premiums included, benchmarked against the government's own wage data for the occupation and region.
3. Built a documentation template for candidate screening. For every Canadian applicant who came in during the new posting window, the HR coordinator recorded the specific, job-related reason they were not selected — for example, unavailability for the required shift pattern or lack of the language proficiency the client-facing role demanded — in writing, at the time of the decision rather than reconstructed later.
4. Assembled the LMIA application package. This included the job offer, the recruitment summary, the business justification for hiring a temporary foreign worker, and supporting evidence of the employer's operations and ability to pay the offered wage.
5. Prepared Tarek's work permit application to follow immediately on approval. Once the LMIA was filed, we assembled the supporting documents for Tarek's own application — employment history, the job offer, proof of qualifications — so there would be no delay submitting it the moment a positive assessment came back.
6. Coordinated the family applications. Winnie's open work permit and Fiona's study permit were prepared alongside Tarek's file, with proof of the family relationship and Fiona's school enrolment plans, so all three applications could move through processing without one holding up the others.

The outcome

The rebuilt recruitment campaign ran for the required period across the required platforms, drew three additional Canadian applicants, and this time every screening decision was documented as it happened. The LMIA application went in with a recruitment file that could withstand scrutiny, and a positive assessment came back several months later — well within the range typical for this category, though the family had braced for it to take longer.

With the positive LMIA in hand, Tarek's work permit application was approved after the usual processing period, and Winnie's and Fiona's applications followed close behind since they had been prepared in parallel rather than started from scratch afterward. The family relocated to Oshawa together, Tarek started in the call-centre role at the wage that had been properly documented from the outset, and Winnie began building a client base as a hairdresser under her open work permit. Fiona enrolled in a local secondary school for the fall term.

None of this required a legal loophole or an unusual argument. It required the recruitment record to actually say, in writing, what the employer had genuinely done and why — the same standard the file would have been held to regardless of who filled it out. The difference was catching the gaps before submission instead of after a refusal, which would have cost the family months of delay and forced the employer to restart the entire recruitment process from zero.

It is worth being clear about what a positive assessment does and does not promise. It does not guarantee that a work permit will be issued — Tarek still had to satisfy an immigration officer that he met the requirements of the job and posed no admissibility concerns, and Winnie's and Fiona's applications were each assessed on their own merits. What the properly documented LMIA did was remove the single biggest point of failure in the whole process before it had a chance to derail everything else. A refused LMIA does not just delay the worker; it can also affect an employer's standing to sponsor future applications, since the government keeps a record of compliance history. Getting the recruitment file right the first time protected Tarek's move and the employer's ability to hire this way again.

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