When Halifax-based QuickFacts posted a job ad promising software developers a four-day work week, the insurance software startup received more than twice as many applicants as it typically had from previous ads — more than 350 people.

The company’s introduction of a shortened work week for employees was part of a wider bid by co-founders Christy Silvestri and Jeff Barsalou to grapple with a labour market that remains complex for high-growth companies.

Six months on from the beginning of mass layoffs from the Silicon Valley giants and an apparent decrease in new job openings in Atlantic Canada, innovation economy salaries remain pricey. Early signs, though, suggest good talent is starting to become more accessible. Founders tend to be adept at listening to people's problems and finding solutions, and they are finding solutions to the tight talent market in creative ways. 

“To sell a good product, you have to listen to what the customer wants,” said Silvestri in an interview. “It’s no different with an employee and finding out what they want. Our recruitment journey is really asking that question to those employees to say, ‘Okay, here’s our pay package … and then asking, outside of this, what are you looking for in your employer?’”

Last April, Propel CEO Kathryn Lockhart said that based on the experiences of her client companies, developers were unlikely to be earning less than $80,000, with senior developers often taking home pay packages worth well into the six figures. Sales and marketing staff, meanwhile, were usually earning at least $70,000 to $80,000.

But in the third quarter, the landscape changed. The American tech giants, including Meta, Apple and Google, announced sweeping layoffs, abruptly adding tens of thousands of skilled workers to the labour market amidst a technology sector showing broader signs of economic weakness. In total, Crunchbase estimates that more than 93,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022, and another 131,000 have been cut so far in 2023.

In Atlantic Canada, LinkedIn data gathered by early-stage VC fund Concrete Ventures indicated that for the first time since General Partner Patrick Hankinson began keeping records, net job creation among the region’s innovation-driven companies fell to almost zero in the third quarter. Just sixteen new roles were created, down from 478 in the first quarter.

The obvious assumption at the time would have been that salaries in the tech sector would fall, reducing cost pressures on startups. The actual effects, though, have been less clear cut.

More recent data is not yet on offer from Concrete Ventures, but Lockhart said that Propel’s resident companies are having significantly different experiences in the talent market depending on whether they have raised capital.

“We’re seeing almost two stories,” she said. “If you are pre-revenue and also pre-venture capital funding, the talent market is tight.

“On the flip side, there’s something really interesting happening: a couple of the companies that we (Propel) have recently talked to are seeing in the last two or three months an uptick in the volume and quality of candidates coming to them.”

She added that she suspects the American tech layoffs have helped lessen the human resources pressure faced by Atlantic startups — not just by increasing the global labour supply in a generally mobile market, but specifically by freeing up high-skilled workers who already lived locally and telecommuted for foreign employers.

“If I worked for Google and lived in Cape Breton, and I was let go, I would be very interested in being hired by a company that’s just raised venture capital, because I know there’s stability there,” she said.

“Or on the flip side, if I have a really keen appetite to have some share of a company, I might look at an earlier stage startup … and see if I can help use my talents at a very early stage.”

Halifax's QuickFacts Wins the $25K Gerry Pond Award

Fredericton-based Profitual, a financial intelligence startup founded by former NBIF investment officers Raymond Fitzpatrick and Daniel Hoyles, recently posted a Substack article that asked whether startup salaries are decreasing.  It said the pressures on the labour market are easing and founders tapping into the global talent pool can find qualified applicants willing to accept lower wages than before.  

"Massive layoffs across tech have . . . driven movement within the industry and only add to the availability of qualified talent seeking their next role," says the article. "This is exactly what we’re seeing across the companies we work with." 

Meanwhile, QuickFacts, which sells software for insurance brokers to match clients with underwriters, has grown in just over two years to 14 full-time employees and usually four co-op students. Earlier this week, QuickFacts won the Gerry Pond Award for sales and traction from online startup incubator Propel.

Often, Silvestri said, small accommodations for employees appear to have outsized benefits for QuickFacts’ recruitment efforts. As examples, she cited ensuring employees have a consistent, one-hour lunch break every day to tend to other responsibilities, as well as letting parents who need to drop their children off at school start work slightly later.

Silvestri, like her peers in the Atlantic Canadian innovation economy, has had to tread a careful line between recruiting the best employees and controlling burn rate at a time when startups still face rising staffing costs.

“It’s tricky, but at the end of the day, you really have to consider the impact on your business of not having the right team in place,” she said. “What is that going to cost your business on the other end, not being able to sell as much, not being able to have the right product?”

Much of last year was marked by a tightening labour market for STEM jobs — particularly software developers — as well as sales and marketing work.

For Silvestri’s QuickFacts, which is near to closing a seed round worth just over $1 million, the four-day work week has helped the company appeal to the same employee desire for work-life balance that led the number of remote job openings in the Canadian IT sector to spike almost 54 percent between July 2021 and July 2022, according to staffing agency Randstad Interim.

“Based on what we’ve already seen with our team’s productivity with a four-day work week, we see us maintaining our productivity level, and also accomplishing our other goal, which is retaining good employees,” said Silvestri, who rolled out the new schedule first for software developers, and then last Thursday, business-wide.

QuickFacts launched its commercialization-ready product in September, and Silvestri plans to be operating nationally by the end of this year, she added, with the United States and U.K. markets to follow.

“We were very quiet about our launch (in 2020) because we wanted to make sure that we had the technology right,” said Silvestri.

“We knew it would go big fast, and that’s why we were very particular about making sure that we had the right product … before we expanded across Canada.”