As her business grows, Gillian McCrae is rewarding more than just merchants and their customers.

She’s also rewarding a lot of workers.

McCrae is the Founder and CEO of GetGifted, a year-and-a-half-old Charlottetown startup that allows local merchants to give customers vouchers for gifts that can only be redeemed in person. The idea is to draw people to the outlets where they’ll spend money. As it grows, it needs more employees.

“Right now, we are at five employees based out of P.E.I.,” said McCrae. “I’m working on three employees in Halifax. In 2014, we’re probably going to be up to 12 to 16 employees, based in P.E.I., Halifax and Toronto.”

McCrae’s experience exemplifies the power of startups in creating employment. Though the sector is young in Atlantic Canada, it’s already created about 3,000 direct jobs. If you include indirect jobs, the startup boom could account for about 15,000 Atlantic Canadian jobs.

Determining firm statistics on the jobs created by startups in Atlantic Canada is difficult on several levels. First, these are small diversified companies, all privately owned and not compelled to reveal their employment numbers. Second, startups in their purest form are developing scalable products from proprietary technology. There are dozens of companies in the region that don’t quite meet that definition. And some of the jobs created are located outside the region, especially by companies with foreign sales teams.

But the results of our survey, coupled with interviews with dozens of companies, show that startups are creating a substantial number of jobs in Atlantic Canada. There were at least 2,400 people working for 290 Atlantic Canadian startups at the end of 2013. If you include companies that have exited, such as Radian6 and Ocean Nutrition Canada, direct employment rises to about 3,000.

Those are, of course, just the direct positions.  Research by Enrico Moretti of the University of California at Berkley shows that each high tech job creates 4.3 indirect jobs due to professional services, taxes and individual spending. Applying multiplier to the Atlantic Canadian startups (which is dominated by tech), it’s easy to estimate the 15,000 jobs have been created because of this movement.

The truly jaw-dropping aspect is the speed with which startups are ramping up their staff levels.

Let’s focus just on the 162 companies that responded to the Entrevestor survey. They told us that they employed a total of 1,453 people as of Dec. 31, 2013, up 43 percent from 1,019 a year earlier. This is actual evidence of job growth within the startup community.

The total payroll reported by the surveyed companies in 2013 was $75.8 million, up 44 percent over the previous year.

Another interesting factor is that these 162 companies taken as a whole don’t show any signs of slowing down their hiring. These companies plan to hire a total of 759 new employees in 2014, which would represent a 52 percent increase over the end of 2013.

"The reason that Startup initiatives (Startup America, StartUp Canada, Startup Spain, Startup Malaysia etc.) took root and spread so quickly internationally was because leaders bet that their innovation-based startup sectors would drive much needed employment gains to help economies recover,” said Dawn Jutla, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Sobey School of Business. “This economic insight is playing out right here at home in Atlantic Canada with our higher startup employment figures.”

For Gillian McCrae, who hopes to triple her staffing this year, the jump in employment was part of the vision when she began the company in late 2012.  “I guess that’s been the intention all along – to give people jobs, really great jobs.”

This article originally appeared in our Spring 2014 Entrevestor Intelligence report.