This week, Canada is implementing a new immigration policy that will give 186 specific jobs—many of which are in science and tech—a higher weight in permanent residency applications. Two Canadian startups have joined forces to help people who want to stay in Canada find those positions.
On Monday, Halifax-based legaltech startup ImmigrateAI Global and Vancouver-based Intern Insider launched PRJOBS, a job board highlighting the open positions that can bolster an immigrant’s chances to secure permanent residency.
Max Medyk,
“How do you, as a person who wants to stay and contribute, find these opportunities?”
ImmigrantAI Global
ImmigrateAI CEO Max Medyk told BetaKit in a Monday interview that, as Canada works to reduce the number of temporary immigrants to five percent of the overall population, the country has made it “very clear” it doesn’t want all immigrants.
“All these reductions are because Canada doesn’t want every immigrant, but Canada wants the right immigrants with the right jobs and the right skills; the problem is how do you, as a person who wants to stay and contribute, find these opportunities?” Medyk said.
Medyk and Intern Insider CEO Ashkan Yazdi Zadeh, a fellow immigrant he met at a conference earlier this year, wanted to find a way to fill that gap.
Under its new Express Entry rules, Canada is awarding bonus points under its Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) to three categories of “high-wage occupations,” meaning that a job offer for an IT manager earns extra points compared to web programmers, who still get their own, albeit lesser, bonus. Those with enough points across a variety of factors, including job status, get invited to apply for permanent residency.
Medyk said PRJOBS has pulled more than 50,000 active jobs from across Canada, with over 10,000 new postings set to be added daily, giving prospective permanent residents an easier path to finding the jobs that could get their application over the finish line.
“For someone whose [CRS] score, say, is about 480, but they need 520 to qualify, that’s a big game changer,” Medyk said.
RELATED: Canada’s tech talent crunch is about access, not availability
Medyk is very familiar with immigration policy. He’s a Ukrainian immigrant who went through the immigration process in both the United States and New Zealand before coming to Canada. The experience inspired him to make immigration policy easier to understand. Medyk has grown an online following through explainer videos on YouTube and other social media platforms. In 2024, he founded ImmigrateAI as a “TurboTax for immigration applications,” which he said scaled from zero to 30,000 users in 140 countries within two years.
Between Medyk’s hundreds of thousands of followers, which earned him a silver YouTube play button that he has displayed in his office, and InternInsider’s equal number of users, PRJOBS looks to help immigrants navigate their way to the Canadian dream amidst shifting regulations.
“The coolest thing is that we’re two immigrants who had gone through very complex systems, [and] had to navigate them on our own,” Medyk said. “Now we’re trying to use technology to bring a simplification layer to people’s lives, so that they can focus on their families, their jobs, whatever, and we help them with that convoluted government system.”
Image courtesy CEWIL Canada.