The CEO of a Dartmouth-based marketing and public safety automation startup with a history of innovation in employee management believes Atlantic Canada’s technology labour crunch is being mis-framed in the community discourse.

Saeed El-Darahali is the founder of SimplyCast, which is a platform that automates marketing and public safety-related digital tasks. He said in an interview that instead of SimplyCast having to scrap with competitors for every employee, talented workers have proven abundant as he eyes enshrining a permanent remote work model at the company.

His experience hiring new employees has led him to believe that Atlantic Canada’s innovation community is not, in fact, suffering from a sweeping labour shortage, but rather extremely high competition for a small subset of employees. Other types of workers, meanwhile, appear to El-Darahali to be more readily available than usual because of recent technology sector layoffs.

“Is the overall job market experiencing shortages? The answer's no,” he said.

“Specific skill sets are experiencing shortages, but we just paint it all with the same brush, which becomes a problem.”

SimplyCast has been receiving 60 to 70 applications per week for most jobs it posts according to El-Darahali, compared to a historical average of 20 to 30, or about 50 immediately before the pandemic.

“It seems like there have been a lot of tech layoffs happening in the last three months,” said El-Darahali. “A lot are coming into our funnel.”

He believes that what most industry observers have billed as a widespread talent crunch is actually fierce competition for a small subset of tech workers with unique expertise. For example, he said programmers capable of coding in C++ and C# are particularly difficult to hire because their skills are unusual and in high demand from government and specific industry players, such as IBM.

SimplyCast has also sought to differentiate itself in the labour market by introducing quality-of-life improvements and unusual benefits for its employees. For example, El-Darahali said the company introduced a four-day work week several years before the idea rose to prominence in the popular consciousness. SimplyCast also helps pay its employees' student loans, and El-Darahali is considering introducing a program to fund down payments on houses for staff.

And after consultations with his team, El-Darahali expects make SimplyCast’s current, remote work model permanent, making good on plans laid before COVID-19.

“That was something that I promised (staff),” said El-Darahali. “I said, ‘Once the company matures, then you could work in Hawaii, if you wanted to.’ We were working towards that.”

On the business development front, meanwhile, El-Darahali said SimplyCast is seeing “double-digit” annual revenue growth and is now active in more than 150 countries.

One driver of that growth has been an increase in the typical size of SimplyCast's clients, which now include several state and local governments.

The company has expanded the number of tools available on its platform to 35, and the increased range of capabilities has attracted clients that need to accomplish more complex tasks. For example, the Halifax restaurants that asked diners to check in by texting “11011” as part of the COVID-19 safety protocols were using SimplyCast.

Clients can also choose which of the 35 tools they want to purchase, rather than buying access to the entire platform. Restaurants using the “11011” service could not use the data they gathered for marketing purposes because the service packages they bought did not offer them that ability.

Despite SimplyCast’s strong growth, El-Darahali said he has no plans to leverage that progress to raise capital.

“We’re generating revenue and paying for our growth," he said. "And we’re 100 percent owned by Nova Scotians.”

SimplyCast now has several job openings, and the complete list of its job postings can be found here.

They include:

• a marketing technology analyst via the federal government’s Canada Summer Jobs wage subsidy program;
• a junior developer, also via the Summer Jobs subsidy;
• a junior quality assurance specialist, preferably with at least two years of software development experience;
• and a junior developer with one or two years of experience.