AyeWork, a start-up job-searching app connects jobseekers with employers

WORK IN PROGRESS

A Windsor-made app invites international students, recent immigrants, and other marginalized jobseekers to “swipe right” on promising job postings. Called “AyeWork,” the ambitious startup is punching in and punching up, doing the work needed to take on some of the world’s largest tech companies.

By Jesse Ziter Photographs by Syx Langemann

As the kids say: it’s like Uber, but for circumventing the barriers to gainful employment faced by newcomers to Canada and precarious freelancers.

As a prominent member of the local Indian community, Rakesh Naidu, President and CEO of the Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber of Commerce, has often found himself fielding calls from the parents of South Asian international students unable to find work in Windsor. For a time, Naidu did his best to help families in what he calls “a very manual way”: placing phone calls to local companies, attempting to match available students to open positions. As the number of international students in the area increased, this became more difficult.

“I was getting so many phone calls from students who were desperate to find work all over Canada,” says Naidu, who himself immigrated to the country as an international student in 2001. “Speaking with some of my friends and others in the community, I’ve dealt with the presumption that international students are lazy, don’t want to work, or have a lot of money. No! It just didn’t sit right with me.”

Enter AyeWork, a job-searching and -posting app that uses a proprietary “intelligent matching” algorithm to connect jobseekers with employers. In a sense, it works a lot like dating apps: AyeWork (pronounced like iWork) invites employers to create job postings associated with specific “desired and required” employee credentials; individual users, meanwhile, compose detailed profiles including resumés—of course—but also skillset information, geographical location, availability, and personal preferences. The pitch: complete a profile and secure, real-time, and genuine job opportunities will find you.

THEDRIVEMAGAZINE.COM According to Naidu, the app’s innovative “flexible availability” tool allows users to communicate complicated, “dynamic” schedules to prospective clients, who in turn are able to fill immediate-occupancy positions in real time. The software also includes integrated messaging for organized client communication. Only employers are allowed to initiate conversation—think women on Bumble—and AyeWork authenticates and confirms employer and jobseeker profiles using a multi-part verification system. Naidu assures us that all user information is encrypted to preserve privacy. The app launched softly on January 17 and racked up over 1,200 users within its first two weeks. “We’ll start our marketing efforts shortly, and we expect that number to increase exponentially,” says Naidu.

The release is a timely intervention. Both St. Clair College and the University of Windsor have significantly expanded their international recruitment efforts in recent years. The university’s graduate-level engineering programs alone, for example, admitted 1,599 international students in 2019, way up from 269 in 2010. According to the most recently publicly available data, about 40 percent of Saints and 30 percent of Lancers are now visa students.

While AyeWork was conceived to address the needs of newcomers to Canada, it promises to be useful to any jobseekers with itinerant freelance work lives or otherwise complicated schedules—basically, natives of the gig economy. “These are jobs that may not be conventional 8-to-5 positions and that come up at any time,” says Naidu. “When the demand arises, there is a way to fill it in real time, without needing extra labour or extra bodies that increase the cost of doing business.” Far from the first smartphone app to connect jobseekers and employers, AyeWork ostensibly finds itself in competition with major multinational players like ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn. Naidu is unfazed.

“We think we’ll be able to take on the big boys,” he says bullishly. “We are providing a solution to a problem that many industries have, which has not been answered or solved by any of the big platforms that exist. None of them are equipped to do it, and none of them have the machine learning and AI interfaces we’ve built.”

According to Naidu, the app is a collaborative effort between a team in India and a Windsor-based group including University of Windsor and St. Clair College students. Harpreet Virk, a personal friend of Naidu and the proprietor of “YQG Technologies Inc.,” is the lead developer. Naidu and his team developed AyeWork as “ordinary citizens”; it is not specifically a Chamber of Commerce initiative.

Currently, the app is available in 26 languages for iOS and Android. Plans are underway for expansion into the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

For the time being, AyeWork is entirely self-funded. Naidu plans on canvassing Canada and elsewhere to explore possibilities for venture capital, angel investment, and other means of generating revenue as his operation “scales up.” There is currently no cost to use the platform, and Naidu insists jobseekers will never have to pay to use it. “Eventually, as we move forward,” he explains, “we will have a payment model for businesses that reflects their size and number of postings, so that we can keep this sustained.”

CANADIAN DREAMER: MOHAMAD FAKIH

In what can seem like an increasingly uncivil world, one Lebanese-Canadian jeweler, restaurateur, community leader, and philanthropist is using food as a starting point towards something better. The Drive catches up with one of Canada’s most newsworthy entrepreneurs to discuss putting hummus in hockey arenas, exploding cultural myths, and why the world needs more Canada.

By Jesse Ziter

Every season, hundreds of thousands of hockey fans get together in Don Cherry’s hometown to participate in the quintessential Canadian communal experience under a glowing neon sign put there by a Muslim Lebanese jeweler.

Since 2018, the second biggest arena in the Greater Toronto Area, home to Mississauga’s Ontario Hockey League team, has been called the Paramount Fine Foods Centre. The naming rights belong to Mohamad Fakih, one of the world’s leading evangelists for Lebanese food and among Canada’s most notable emergent philanthropists.

As president of Paramount Fine Foods, Fakih envisions a future where shawarma and hummus are as ubiquitous in the Canadian diet as, say, burgers or bagels. More importantly, he sees a place in even the most overtly Canadian cultural expressions for people who look like him—or indeed like anyone at all.

THEDRIVEMAGAZINE.COM “To associate a community facility like that with the name of an immigrant who landed here only 20 years ago sends a straight message,” says Fakih, who tells me he cried the day the arena deal was agreed. “The opportunity available to everybody in Canada is unlimited.”

The fastest-growing Middle Eastern food chain in North America—and the only one to establish a foothold in Windsor—Paramount attempts to alloy North American–grade consistency, comfort, and quality standards with one of the world’s great cuisines. Picture the sort of food that tastes great and Instagrams well from overhead: sharable, familystyle mezze plates; bright, lemon-lacquered greens sparkled with sumac. So far, the company has planted its flag in high-demand locations like Toronto Union Station, the Niagara Fallsview Casino, and McGill University. Headquartered in Mississauga, the privately held corporation’s 76 sit-down restaurants, quick-service outlets, and halal butcher shops employ more than 1,500 in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Côte D’Ivoire. A self-described “very positive person,” Fakih immigrated to Canada as a refugee in 1999. He had $1,200 to his name. While Fakih’s story might read to a jaded audience as a familiar “bootstrappy” narrative, with him, there’s much more steak than sizzle.

To wit: Fakih has been formally feted for his business and philanthropic work by more organizations than we have space to list here. Perhaps most notably, Fakih is the “face and voice” of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Canada. In his ambassadorial capacity, he’s hosted conversations with the likes of Malala Yousafzai, the young Nobel laureate female education activist. Fakih routinely explains in publications like The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life that food can

play a role in mitigating cultural and social differences. It’s immediately clear that this is more than a soundbite. In any setting, Fakih is one of those people who seems to radiate positivity. “My dad used to bring people we didn’t know to join our dinner table at home,” he recalls. “When you start breaking bread with people, they put their agendas aside, and they start talking about their family. To have our food available to all Canadians is another way to take away borders.”

Born in 1971, Fakih grew up in Beirut during the 15-year Lebanese Civil War. His rise to prominence, told in greater detail elsewhere, reads like a superhero origin narrative.

After a brief spell in Damascus, Syria, as a teenaged student, Fakih studied gemology in Padua, Italy. He returned to Beirut and experienced some success in the jewelry business, but eventually took a chance to pursue a Canadian visa in search of a more stable future.

Fakih’s early years in the country were difficult. He worked at Tim Hortons for five days. He taught French to the landlord’s daughter in exchange for rent. He pestered an Eaton Centre jeweler for a chance at a job, eventually offered to work for free. He spent a great many hours on the TTC, and not many at all in bed. Then he found some success selling watches in GTA shopping centres.

In 2006, Fakih’s wife, Hanan, sent him to pick up some baklava for entertaining guests. He found a “mom-and-pop” Lebanese spot near Dixie and Eglinton called “Paramount,” but the restaurant was poorly decorated and in rough shape. A patron recognized Fakih, then en route to becoming a prominent businessman, which led to the restaurant owner asking him for a loan. The business was struggling, and his employees’ visas were tied to its continued operation.

Fakih loaned him $250,000. “Part of the money was borrowed,” he now tells me. “The other part was everything I’ve made in my life.” Before the week was over, Revenue Canada had frozen the bakery owner’s account; Fakih’s investment had essentially disappeared into the ether. The owner, admitting defeat, offered to sell his restaurant equipment to help recover the money. Instead, Fakih decided to assume control of the business.

Fakih claims he can’t fry an egg and didn’t know anything about food, but he knew customer service. In relatively short order, Fakih more than quadrupled the eatery’s sales. After two years Fakih opened a second, internally financed location in Thornhill. Before long, the company had committed to a flagship Yonge and Dundas location, which came with an eyewatering $40,000-a-month rent bill.

Today, as CEO of a global food service concern, Fakih is best known as a humanitarian. He attracted national headlines in October when he offered a public show of support for Soufi’s, a Queen Street West Syrian restaurant forced to shutter after its owners received a barrage of racist, politically motivated threats. In January 2017, when a white supremacist gunman killed six and wounded nearly 20 others in a mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, Fakih contributed tens of thousands of dollars to cover funeral expenses and building repairs.

Fakih also supports several efforts benefitting unhoused families. In December 2017, during a historic cold snap, Fakih helped place dozens of homeless Torontonians in hotel rooms. At one point, he organized an effort to raise $125,000 in less than a day for the families displaced by a catastrophic fire in a Toronto highrise.

Currently, his major philanthropic project is the Canada Strong Campaign, a fundraising initiative that aids the victims of Ukranian Airlines Flight 752. At press time, the campaign was about three-quarters of the way to its $1.5 million goal. Fakih has promised to contribute $30,000 of his own money and pay for any administrative expenses, ensuring that all donations reach directly the families of victims to pay for funerals and other expenses associated with the tragedy.

As Fakih and Paramount’s community-first corporate ethos has garnered more column inches, the company has logged record sales and found unprecedented success attracting and retaining high-demand employees. While Paramount was built by immigrants, it is sustained by a diverse, multicultural team, including many who didn’t grow up with kebeh and grape leaves on the family table.

“I think CEOs need to change the way they look at business,” says Fakih. “My franchisees used to complain about me donating to the community over putting my face or Paramount’s logo on a bus going down the street,” Fakih continues. “But paying it forward is not only a feel-good thing to do. It’s the profitable thing to do. It’s been proven that customers will support more often a restaurant, or a company, or a product, where they know that the culture and philosophy of the brand is to help others in need in the community.”

To this end, during the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, Fakih worked directly with the Government of Canada to hire more than 150 refugees into his restaurant empire. Today, some members of that hiring class are restaurant managers or executives within the company.

“There is no reason for not helping refugees,” says Fakih, who brushes aside the common misperception that hiring refugees represents a security risk. “They don’t need a handout; they need a hand up to support them. Refugees will never come to a country looking for a peaceful life and create trouble there. The people who are with us have grown in the business, but even the people who didn’t stay with us, we provided with them their first job experience in Canada. It prepared them for the next opportunity in their life.”

While Fakih was pleased with the Canadian government’s response to the situation in Syria, he cites it as a perfect example of how the private sector can often provide a more agile response to humanitarian crises. “Leaders, in general, are not people who look for excuses,” he explains. “CEOs, business leaders, and government and political leaders need to understand that governments are bureaucratic. They have budgets and elections and they’re worried about optics.”

Fakih makes his home in Mississauga—the heart of Ford country—with his wife and three sons, Adam, Karim, and Emad.

“Lately we’re seeing bigotry and hatefulness becoming bolder,” he acknowledges, “but we must maintain the Canadian dream for the people who are coming after us. We want our children to see the best version of Canada. The world needs more Canada, and it needs us to fight against the change driven by a very small percentage of Canadians who are possibly seeing what’s happening south of the border and becoming bolder because of that.

“We have to stand up against hate, all of us. Otherwise, our silence will be like a wink, telling those people that they can do more.”

To Fakih’s mind, the Canadian dream is more alive even now than many of us realize.

“The American dream is the picket fence separating people from each other,” he explains, “but the Canadian dream is for us all. I think we have a much better dream, to be honest. Canada is not the same Canada as in the old days, and I think that’s good news.” D