Pythian Receives Employer Excellence Award from Hire Immigrants Ottawa

OTTAWA, CANADA, Mar 07, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Pythian, a leading provider of data infrastructure services, was honoured today with the 2012 Employer Excellence Award for Retention and Engagement by Hire Immigrants Ottawa (HIO) for its achievement in workplace diversity.

Presented at the HIO Employer Council of Champions Summit-a multidisciplinary council comprising executives from top Ottawa public and private sector companies, business associations and labour groups-the award recognizes Pythian's ability to recruit the top five percent of the world's technology talent to create a diverse workforce of experts speaking more than 20 languages.

"As a culture of experts, we search the world over to recruit the best skilled professionals to work at Pythian," said Paul Vallee, Pythian's Founder and Executive Chairman. "It's an honour to receive this recognition from an organization dedicated to enhancing the abilities of employers like us to access the talents of skilled immigrants in Canada's capital city. Here, we don't care about the last country that you've worked in, we care that you love data."

Warner Chaves of Costa Rica is just one example of Pythian's knack for attracting the world's top talent. After reading about the company in Oracle Magazine, Chaves wrote to Pythian on a whim to see if it would consider him as a candidate; after a stint as a database administrator, he now leads the Microsoft SQL Server team.

"I wasn't considering a move to Canada, but their support persuaded me. I thought of it as an adventure-I would try it for six months. I'm now a permanent Canadian resident," he said. "My colleagues are experts in their field and I'm challenged to produce innovative work. Pythian has not only opened the doors for me to come to Canada, they've also paved the way to help me advance my career."

Employee retention and engagement are top priorities for Heidi Hauver, Pythian's Director of Human Resources. As the architect behind Pythian's successful incentive programs, she says her leadership team has an open-door policy to ensure employee recommendations are given a voice.

"We do monthly check-ins with new hires and the majority say they like it here because they can see that people enjoy working together," she said. "People at Pythian are valued and they know it. They're challenged daily, and they're given the tools and resources to grow personally and professionally. We invest in people because we want them to stay, be engaged and, most importantly, be happy."

About Pythian

Pythian is a global database and application infrastructure services company for Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Since 1997, companies have entrusted Pythian to keep their database infrastructures running efficiently and to help them strategically align their IT and business goals. Pythian's unparalleled DBA skills, mature methodologies, best practices and tools enable clients to do more with fewer resources. Pythian's corporate headquarters is in Ottawa, Canada, with offices worldwide. To find out more, visit Pythian online at http://www.pythian.com or view our job listings at http://www.pythian.com/about/careers/job-listings/

        
        Contacts:
        Media Contact:
        Pythian
        Vanessa Simmons
        Director of Marketing
        1-613-897-9444
        simmons@pythian.com
        
        
        

SOURCE: The Pythian Group

        mailto:simmons@pythian.com
        

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Canada looks to ease huge immigration backlog

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The government of Canada is looking at ways to streamline its immigration system in order to eliminate a backlog of more than a million applicants.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said on Wednesday the government was considering a wide range of options to create a more nimble immigration system better able to meet employers' needs for skilled labor.

"The doors are always going to be open. We're planning on continuing to receive over a quarter of a million immigrants per year," he said. "The question is how do we select those who are most likely to succeed and do so on a fast basis."

He stressed that he had not made any decisions.

One idea is to have provinces go through the backlog of applicants and pick out people with the qualifications companies need, such as engineers in the oil business.

"It's about ... matching the immigrants with the jobs rather than just pushing them into the general labor market to sink or swim," Kenney said.

Canada remains relatively open to immigrants, but many newcomers complain it is difficult to get their education and professional qualifications recognized, forcing them to retrain or find work in a different, often unskilled, field.

Kenney said he was considering requiring prospective immigrants who already have credentials to get a pre-assessment from professional associations in Canada of their chances of having their credentials recognized.

(Reporting by Randall Palmer; Editing by Janet Guttsman and Rob Wilson)

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