Sharing our knowledge to grow our candidate networks, supporting people growth, and making sure we’re on top of tech community movements and trends.

July 12, 2018

On June 1st, 2018 we continued with (one part of) our journey to grow the Canadian tech ecosystem by hosting the the third annual Canadian Tech at Scale conference in partnership with Jean-Michel Lemieux, SVP Engineering at Shopify. We built upon the success of the 2017 conference, bringing together even more of Canada’s top tech…

July 12, 2018

A few weeks ago we got back together for our fourth Coaching Circle workshop, Feeling like a fraud? We had decided to tackle the idea of Imposter Syndrome as it relates to women in the workplace, and explore how to stop the tape that sometimes manifests in the following ways (trust me, this is not…

May 3, 2018

Someone in your workplace says something that throws you off guard. Could be an offhand remark. Could be a blatant use of language against you. Could be they didn’t even know it would offend you, it’s just that it brought up memories of other things. The result is you didn’t know what to say and…

March 12, 2018

One thing we know EVERYONE does not do well is giving (and receiving) feedback – it’s the first place we start our training at every organization we work at! Many of us think we are giving feedback to others in a constructive, non-hurtful way, and the reality is we often use judgmental, accusatory language that…

February 6, 2018

Over a year ago we began to hatch ideas to support and impact the imbalance of women in tech. The culture that seemed to be pervasive in high-growth tech was – what the community termed the bro culture. It’s a seeming default based on the overwhelming profile of young men who are funded. In the…

January 31, 2018

2017 was the year of THE stat. If you worked in tech in 2017 than you know the one I’m talking about — Toronto added more technology jobs than New York and San Francisco combined from 2015 to 2016. We knew it was our time. The challenge was we didn’t have enough homegrown talent to…

December 8, 2017

These days, it can feel that the only thing that is really constant is change. With all the amazing advances in technology, borders disappearing and the bar for knowledge increasing rapidly, it’s no surprise that we all have to keep ourselves in consistent personal and professional growth. “Change is inevitable. Progress is optional.” – Tony…

September 15, 2017

When Donald Trump was first elected as the 45th President of the United States, we wrote about how we wanted to make work great again for Canadians working in the US. But our argument for why was only rooted in the fact that a majority of the public were not happy about the decision. So…

August 18, 2017

June 15, 2017 marked the second annual Canadian Tech at Scale conference, which brought together 120 of Canada’s top engineering leaders to learn from each other’s successes and failures as our companies have scaled. The impressive line-up of (all Canadian, eh) speakers included Tony Savor (Engineering Director, Facebook), Inmar Givoni (Director of AI, kindred), Johnathan…

August 11, 2017

Late last year we announced that we were making a move into the leadership coaching space because there was so much unrealized potential without the proper guidance to be a successful leader.  From startup developers that have been thrown into a lead role with no experience managing people, or a young entrepreneur who has never…

June 2, 2017

Starting a new job is super exciting, but it can also be very nerve-racking. It’s very common to spend the weeks leading up to day one with thoughts of doubt. Take me, for example: I spent nearly three weeks freaking out before starting at gdR. And because I overanalyze EVERYTHING, my first instinct was to…

May 17, 2017

Every tech company has a different approach to interviewing. Some may employ a more traditional approach with questions focused on your experience and others may be as “out there” as the ol’ draw an owl approach. Regardless of their differences, there are always commonalities across the board. Below are a few of our favourite interview…

March 22, 2017

Tech Dreams is a series where we explore how you can stand out to startups, large tech companies and innovation labs during the hiring and onboarding process; from start to finish – resume tips and beyond. A resume is a funny thing if you think about it. It’s essentially a single document that’s meant to…

March 2, 2017

You just went through a vigorous interview process at a company that you were so excited about joining. You beat out all the other candidates due to your technical knowledge, amazing people skills and personality fit with the company. Your onboarding process starts and you are starting to settle in. You feel you have so…

February 28, 2017

It’s no secret that agency tech recruiters don’t have the best reputation. I mean, you might have landed a decent job through a recruiter before and that’s great. But generally, there seems to be a pretty negative consensus out there. You could Google it or look on Glassdoor, but you already know.

February 22, 2017

Everyone has a story to tell. Toronto hosts a vibrant tech ecosystem that continues to grow and make waves around the world. But the community is made up of individuals, each with their own experiences of triumph, struggle, detours and grit. We’re launching this new Career Roadmap series to share just some of these many…

February 14, 2017

What is self care? A super easy definition is that self care is an active choice to engage in activities that help to gain and/or maintain an optimal level of health. An easier definition: loving on yourself in ways that make you feel good and are not harmful to your well being. Self care is…

February 2, 2017

So I might be slightly biased, but a super talented coach I know, Tara Rhodes (full disclosure, she’s a colleague at gdR), met up with Aaron Parker, the host of TheLuckyFew podcast, this week to talk about leadership coaching and development at gdR.

January 31, 2017

A lot can happen in ten years. In 2007, Grossman Dorland Recruiting (gdR) opened its doors. As we reflect on this milestone, we are hopeful that we’ve made a significant difference in the tech community. Take a look at the following infograph to see what gdR has accomplished in a decade and what our objectives…

January 23, 2017

January 2017 marks our 10 year anniversary giving us an opportunity to reflect on our role in assisting in the growth of Canadian tech. Since day one, we made a conscious decision to work with innovative entrepreneurs, fast-paced companies, and creative people, which has made the experience fulfilling and dynamic everyday.

January 17, 2017

Coaching has really increased in popularity. As much as you sports buffs may think I’m talking about athletic coaching, I am speaking from a personal growth perspective. Simply put, coaching is personal training that helps professionals reach their career goals, no matter where they are in the workforce – entry-level, CEO, and everything in between….

January 10, 2017

Whatever your opinion of 2016, there’s no denying it was an eventful year: there were tragedies around the world, we lost many artists, contested political decisions reverberated across Britain and the US… Thankfully, the news isn’t all bad, especially for the Toronto tech ecosystem.

December 15, 2016

“Wait, are you serious?” is what we often hear when we talk about our referral program. I’ve been told it sounds too good to be true, but I promise you won’t get Rickrolled if you click through. It’s super simple – we pay you for helping a friend get a great new job! Here’s how…

November 9, 2016

Dear Canadians working in the U.S., Did you hear the news? Donald Trump won the U.S. election and a lot of Americans are not happy about this. So much so that they crashed the Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s website last night. The good news for you – you don’t need to worry about immigration laws.

October 27, 2016

As a certified coach, people often ask me how to know if they could benefit from coaching. Many think it’s just for executives and high-profile leaders they’ve heard use it, like Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg – and then they assume they aren’t senior enough or can’t afford it. Some think of coaching with its old…

October 19, 2016

Choosing an executive coach can feel daunting. Simply search for “coach, <insert your city>” and results will vary from the Coach brand to coaching associations. Here are five simple steps I’ve found to be the most effective for choosing a coach:

October 11, 2016

As an executive coach, I’ve seen people’s careers transformed by coaching. Many of the world’s most admired companies, from Google to Goldman Sachs, invest in coaching, and annual spending on coaching in the U.S. is estimated at roughly $1 billion, according to Harvard Business Review. Yet I find that many people still don’t know what executive…

October 11, 2016

We listened to the community gdR was founded with one core objective in mind – help grow the Canadian tech ecosystem. What better way to make an impact than by helping people that drive the ecosystem forward.

March 23, 2016

Our team at gdR believes at our core that Canada has the ability to become an even more prominent global leader in technology. We believe that talented people, most of all, will enable Canada’s tech ecosystem to thrive. That’s why we work to help tech talent grow meaningful, fulfilling careers here at home and why…

March 2, 2016

There are a ton of tech community events that give you access to the work spaces and teams of startups, like Startup Open House or one of the many Meetups hosted in startup offices. Maybe you’ve imagined what its like to work there and the HR manager’s pitch about their cool brick and beam office…

December 16, 2015

Looking back on 2015, we’re in awe of how much growth we’ve witnessed in the Toronto tech ecosystem. Since we help companies grow their teams, we’ve seen first-hand the rise in demand for great technical talent, the influx of funding (both local & international) helping power the expansion of some fantastic startups, and what the…

December 1, 2015

Last week at the Design Exchange, Dan Makoski spoke on “deeply human design” and how it “can transform technology and business in profound new directions.” What everyone in the audience actually wanted to know was why he left Google to join a financial services company, Capital One, as its VP of Design. Not the typical move for…

September 23, 2015

At this year’s FITC Web Unleashed, Tammy Everts of San Francisco-based performance consultancy SOASTA spoke about web performance to a captive audience of developers. There’s no wonder the room was packed. Everts is a compelling speaker and doesn’t mince words when explaining why developers should care about web performance: it impacts every metric that businesses…

August 27, 2015

Developers are curious, creative and always looking for new challenges. In an industry constantly propelling itself forward, like technology, the biggest challenge is keeping up. Lucky for Toronto developers, one of the biggest web development events in the country is just around the corner to get you up-to-date on the latest trends. gdR is a…

August 6, 2015

Speaking with Software Developers and Product Managers (PMs) at a recent lunch we hosted, it’s clear that they’re both motivated by many of the same things: curiosity, a sense of accomplishment when solving puzzles, an enjoyment of building tangible products. The product/development relationship in many companies isn’t always smooth sailing, however, despite this shared love…

August 6, 2015

At this summer’s SOLID conference in San Francisco, Andy Goodman of global design consultancy Fjord gave a talk about a topic we’ve often discussed on our team: the impact of the user interface (UI) moving away from screens and towards more intuitive, human-centric interactions like haptics, ambient intelligence and voice control. This will surely have…

June 25, 2015

This post was made possible with the expertise of two local developers: Kenneth Rose, Principal Software Engineer at PagerDuty (who just returned from ScalaDays in Amsterdam) and Jason Goodwin, and experienced developer who has worked on complex technical products at companies like Rogers, mDialog and BlastRadius. Developers are solving problems at a bigger scale today…

June 17, 2015

Toronto’s startup community includes a number of companies with great potential, an increasing amount of venture funding to support growth and a solid talent base. The ecosystem is really just beginning to mature. While there are a number of Meetups and a growing number of high-calibre events that highlight some of our top leaders in…

June 12, 2015

This post was made possible by speaking with several talented local Developers: Matthew Smith (Product Manager/Architect at Pivotal Labs), David Kiss (Sr. Java Developer at Sysomos) and Jagtesh Chadha (Software Engineer at Bibliocommons). With the increasing complexity of web applications and the rise of the cloud, DevOps and continuous delivery, there has been an increased…

January 21, 2015

2014 was a banner year for the Toronto tech and startup community, with more activity and new initiatives than we’ve ever seen before. While our team has been busy placing tons of great people at some of Toronto’s best startups and software companies, it’s also in the fabric of the gdR family to volunteer with,…

January 14, 2015

This post was made possible by having insightful conversations with a few great Toronto designers: Ricardo Vazquez, UI/UX Designer at Mozilla (@iamrvazquez), Alex M. Chong, Product Designer at Pivotal Labs (@alexmchong) and Huda Idrees, Director of Design at Wealthsimple (@hidrees). The workflow of an agile software company can present challenging timelines to UX Designers. The…

November 24, 2014

For our second gdR Grow learning event on Wednesday, November 26, we’re turning our attention to performance, scale and reliability (check out a recap of our first event, too). We’re bringing together 40+ CTOs, Developers, Architects, Tech Leads and DevOps Engineers for an interactive panel discussion, some pints and great food from It’s All GRK….

November 14, 2014

This post was made possible by having insightful conversations with a few great Toronto designers: Ricardo Vazquez, UI/UX Designer at Mozilla (@iamrvazquez), Alex M. Chong, Product Designer at Pivotal Labs (@alexmchong) and Huda Idrees, who has experience as a Product Designer at both Wave and Wattpad (@hidrees). Every UX Designer I’ve ever met with has…

October 28, 2014

We’ve joined 120 Toronto startups in opening our doors to the over 2400 people registered for Startup Open House Toronto. This free one-day event, Thursday October 30th from 4-7PM, was created to showcase what it’s like to work within Toronto’s vibrant startup community. If you’re a student, young professional, job seeker or just plain curious…

October 21, 2014

Working for a startup that gets acquired can bring with it a mixed bag of emotions for many developers. While it can be a moment of validation for what you’ve been crafting for years, it can be scary and overwhelming as your small, autonomous startup transitions into a larger company. But while a common attitude…

October 20, 2014

On a warm fall evening recently, our office was filled with the smell of spicy southern barbecue cuisine – crunchy fried chicken, jerk chickpea and melt-in-your-mouth brisket sandwiches – from Toronto’s trendsetting barbecue joint Barque Smokehouse. Desks were cleared, replaced by a few dozen white folding chairs. The after-work quiet was replaced by a gradually…

October 1, 2014

On September 17th & 18th, nearly 580+ people packed into a wing of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for FITC’s Web Unleashed event, which brought together over 40 speakers on front-end development. Sessions dived into topics like developing for Virtual Reality, Swift, Responsive Design, Game Design, Mobile Web apps, HTML5, and modern JavaScript frameworks. Sessions…

September 23, 2014

Our team is constantly meeting with hundreds of people who work at some of Toronto’s best startups and software companies. One thing that every one of them has in common is that they want to keep learning. They want to expand their toolkit with the latest and greatest, to undertake a career path that will…

September 15, 2014

We often get questions about how our Referral Rewards work. Some people think it’s too good to be true. We pay you just for helping a friend get a great new job? Well, yeah. Here’s how it works.

August 20, 2014

For years, established tech hubs abroad have attracted Canadian professionals into startup jobs. There, they help scale these startups, gain valuable experience about startup success, and contribute to the progress and economic growth of these vibrant cities. But the Canadian startup landscape today has changed. We’ve become increasingly competitive on the global stage, ranked as…

May 15, 2014

George Zamfir appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field. George is a web developer and Toronto-based accessibility consultant. Prior to joining Facebook as an Accessibility Specialist, he ran his own accessibility consulting company, Good Wally, and spent several years as a Technical Accessibility…

July 10, 2013

Watching your software startup mature into a more sustainable midsize company can be a very exciting time. But this growth comes with a whole new set of challenges. How can a startup anticipate and take action on what lies ahead? To answer this, we asked Sean Doran, Director of Technology at Wave, about pain points…

May 22, 2013

Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering for Xtreme Labs, appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field.  We meet with mobile developers or developers that are curious about moving into mobile development all the time. The attraction isn’t surprising. Mobile is an exciting area…

November 6, 2012

What’s it like to run a startup at Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups? How do you get in and how do you thrive? We decided to go there ourselves to get an insider opinion from James Woods, CTO of Shifthub, a mobile employee scheduling platform for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs). The offering: find a…

October 16, 2012

This post originally appeared on the HackerYou blog on October 16, 2012. HackerYou is a new program from the team at Ladies Learning Code that offers hands-on, project-based learning about tech taught by industry professionals. You can read the original post here.  As a fan of Ladies Learning Code, I was really curious to try a workshop…

September 21, 2012

This post originally appeared on the Wave Accounting blog on Friday, September 21st. I was invited to contribute my perspective on hiring for small and midsize businesses to the blog’s Small Business 500 series. Read the original post here.  A business is only as strong as its talent. This is especially true when you’re running a startup or…

September 20, 2012

This post originally appeared on the Girl Geeks TO blog. I was invited to contribute my audience perspective for the event Getting to Grips with Algorithms! (cue mighty roar), which took place on Monday, September 17th at the headquarters of Toronto startup TinEye.  Read the original post here. As soon as I walked up the stairs…

September 12, 2012

Earlier this year, Toronto saw a new startup accelerator emerge on the tech landscape: Driven Accelerator. Putting a unique spin on things, Driven focuses exclusively on providing training, support and resources to under-represented minorities in digital technology. We’re proud to announce that our Managing Director, Bruce Dorland, and myself have joined the Driven community. We’ve…

August 2, 2012

Leona Hobbs appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field.  Companies are extending agile processes beyond software development. Many candidates we speak to are interested in working in this type of dynamic, iterative teamwork-driven environment. This could be a startup that uses agile…

July 25, 2012

On Friday, July 20th, Toronto played host to Throne of JS, a two-day conference focused on discussing and debating JavaScript frameworks. As a sponsor, we had the chance to attend the opening night event on Friday night at the Extension Room in the Distillery District. The conference brought together the creators of every important client-side…

July 19, 2012

This post first appeared in StartupNorth on July 19, 2012. Occasionally I interview a developer that really impresses me with their ability to make their profile come to life beyond their resume. Want to know what makes these developers stand out? Here are my top ten tips for making a big impression. Many of these tips work…

June 13, 2012

Ever thought of founding your own startup? Our guest contributor Joseph Puopolo took the leap when he recently launched Printchomp, a customized goods search engine for the print industry. Since we meet with so many entrepreneurs and developers with startup ambitions, we asked Joseph to share some of the ups and downs in his own…

May 24, 2012

One of the biggest threats to developers today is the outsourcing and offshoring of their jobs. How can developers make themselves so valuable to an organization that outsourcing is no longer a threat? To be more precise, how can developers today add more value to their organizations so that if tomorrow they’re faced with having…

May 15, 2012

This post appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field.  Big data is a popular theme in tech headlines this spring. In light of this, we asked ourselves: what’s new and interesting in Toronto’s big data scene? In the headlines, big data search and…

May 4, 2012

In April, the gdR team attended SproutUp, Sprouter’s monthly social event for entrepreneurs, startups and Sprouter fans. What I was most curious to see at the event was guest speaker Matt Meeker, who co-founded Meetup.com in 2002. Meeker’s tale of success was not without a few bumps in the road: blowing their first $15M of…

April 20, 2012

This post appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field.  Andrew Trossman is a veteran of cloud computing. Currently Distinguished Engineer, Common Cloud Stack at IBM, he co-founded and was Director of R&D at Think Dynamics, a Toronto-based maker of automated server provisioning…

April 19, 2012

This post appears as part of our Leaders Series, conversations with tech and media leaders about influential trends and topics in their field. What is driving change in the media industry today and how can professionals anticipate these changes? We had this question in mind when we recently sat down with digital media expert Duke…

April 19, 2012

As recruiters, we’re right in the thick of the tech and digital media industries. We interview an average of 10,000 tech and media professionals every year and we’ve worked with dozens of innovative and award-winning companies – including Braham Top 300 Tech Companies, Deloitte Fast 50 winners and Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies.