Ottawa’s e-commerce giant has crossed an impressive employee threshold in the capital, which newly released stats say remains a top tech hub in Canada.
Shopify announced Tuesday it has officially passed the 1,000-employee mark in Ottawa. Chief operating officer Harley Finkelstein made the announcement onstage at SaaS North, the annual conference for software-as-a-service companies held at the Shaw Centre.
Shopify, which launched more than a decade ago as an online snowboard shop and has since bloomed into a global e-commerce platform used by more than one million merchants, splits its local workforce between 150 Elgin St. and 234 Laurier Ave. W. In total, Shopify now employs more than 4,000 people around the world.
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Along with announcing its 1,000-person milestone, Shopify released a new video Tuesday advertising the capital as a destination for prospective employees, highlighting the company’s hometown for its lifestyle amenities, affordable real estate and proximity to nature.
The attractiveness of Ottawa as a tech talent hub was also the subject of a report released Tuesday from real estate services firm CBRE.
Ottawa once again ranked second in the national report, which ranks cities based on metrics including availability of talent, quality of labour and gross operating costs. Toronto maintained its top place, while Vancouver and Waterloo edged up one spot each, bumping Montreal down to No. 5.
Ottawa again tops the country in terms of tech talent concentration, with 9.9 per cent of the capital’s labour force working in tech. With today’s news, roughly 1.6 per cent of Ottawa’s 64,500 total tech workers now work for Shopify. The size of the city’s talent pool has declined roughly 5.3 per cent over the past five years, however, according to CBRE’s data.
The capital’s tech workforce also remains the most educated talent pool out of all other Canadian tech hubs, with some 41.1 per cent of workers holding a bachelor’s degree or above.
