Recruitment Opacity and Immigrant Labour-Market Vulnerability in Canada: An Integrated Statistical, Scholarly, and Regulatory Analysis

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Access to employment is shaped by recruitment processes, yet applicants face significant opacity regarding vacancy existence, filtering criteria, decision timelines, AI usage, and competition status. The author terms this "recruitment opacity" and investigates its potential to exacerbate immigrant labour market disadvantage in Canada. Employing a convergent secondary evidence design, the study analyzes Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data (working-age adults 25–54), a focused review of 41 peer-reviewed articles, and targeted federal and provincial (Ontario/BC) regulatory instruments. Labour force data offer contextual distributional patterns, not direct opacity or causality measures. The recent immigrant employment penalty was 14.2 and 6.9 percentage points in 2019 and 2025, respectively, while the unemployment penalty remained relatively stable at 4.5–4.6%. In 2025, recent immigrant women recorded a 69.5% employment rate and 11.8% unemployment, compared to 83.5% and 4.1% for Canadian-born women. Ontario’s regulatory duties exceed British Columbia’s in wages, Canadian experience, vacancy status, AI transparency, post-interview communication, record-keeping, and fraud reporting, with only equality reporting shared. To operationalize these dynamics, the authors introduce the Recruitment Opacity-Vulnerability Framework (ROVF), linking access, allocation, psychosocial, and institutional vulnerabilities to four opacity types: information asymmetry, procedural injustice, reciprocal violation, and identity threat. The central hypothesis posits that recruitment opacity functions as a multiplier, not a direct cause, of recent immigrant disadvantage.</p>