Virtual Job Fair for Chéticamp and Surrounding Areas

On Wednesday September 23rd, Support Services Group will be hosting a virtual job fair for Chéticamp and surrounding areas. The fair will air on CHNE’s Facebook Live page at 10 am, and it will be followed by a question and answer period via Zoom at 11 am. 

To provide more details about the event and discuss its possibilities for economic development in the community, CHNE hosted a panel discussion with Lisa Lavin, Operations Director for Support Services Group, Lucille Timmons, from the Conseil économique de la Nouvelle-Écosse (CDÉNÉ) and Alfred Poirier, District 1 councillor at Inverness County.

The company offering the jobs, Support Services Group, provides customer service outsourcing to other businesses around the world. Founded in 1991, its closest office is in North Sydney. 

The 10 to 20 new bilingual positions the company will be creating come from the increased demand for virtual customer service during the pandemic. Employees would be able to work from home. “With COVID, we’re seeing more and more opportunities with our customers who are looking to service their customers who are shopping more digitally or are looking for more customer service over the phone, chat or email.” Operations Director Lisa Lavin said. The company offers both part-time and full-time permanent employment.

Lucille Timmons, who is helping to organize the fair through CDÉNÉ, the Nova Scotia Economic Council, said the jobs would give people the opportunity to get out of the seasonal work cycle. “This is such a great opportunity, especially for our rural areas to work from home permanently full time. This is not normally available to us,” she said. “For our area, which we are a tourism-related area, I think we are born with the customers service here in the Chéticamp area, and we are very renowned for that. So, I think this is going to be a good fit for a lot of our agents.”

District 1 Councillor Alfred Poirier welcomes the jobs for the community. “As we move along with technology," he said, "especially with fiber optic coming in in the next few months ... I think this will be an opening to other such ventures. … Unemployment is very high, and we have a very good base of bilingual and English people from the Margarees, all around, Pleasant Bay, Meat Cove, my district.”

People will be able to be interviewed for the positions during the fair via Zoom or in person at the Saint-Anne University campus in Saint-Joseph-du-Moine. Paid training for the jobs will start on Monday September 28th.

Support Services Group is looking for people with customer service experience and internet access with a minimum of Min 2 mb/s (Uplink) and Min 5 mb/s (Downlink).

The Nova Scotia government announced it will be spending $193 million towards improving internet service for rural areas, including Chéticamp. But the project won’t be completed for another few months, so it might be a problem for residents in underserved areas. Councillor Poirier invited people who want to apply for a job but have no internet access to contact him. He said the municipality will try to give them a workspace until internet issues are resolved for the area.