Canadian employment lawyer explains how HR can avoid crossing the line from reasonable recruitment tactics into persuasion, inducement and wrongful dismissal claims
When Canadian employers set out to woo senior talent from comfortable, well-paid jobs, they’re often thinking about succession planning and competitive advantage — not what will happen if that hire is dismissed two years later.
As a recent Ontario Supreme Court decision shows, once an employee argues they were induced to leave secure employment, a straightforward termination can turn into a disputed, credibility-heavy wrongful dismissal case, with potentially longer notice periods and bonus claims at stake.
Employment lawyer Faraz Kourangi of Williams Law says inducement is not a binary on-off switch in Canadian wrongful dismissal law, but rather a “spectrum, based on the full recruitment context.”
For employers, that spectrum runs from simply hiring someone who was already actively jobhunting, to aggressively pursuing a candidate who was not looking to move and felt secure where they were.
As Kourangi explains, where a specific situation falls along that line can affect how long a court thinks it should take that person to find comparable work after termination.
In the Campbell case, the employee says she left a senior role with a $180,000 base salary and guaranteed bonus structure after being contacted by a recruiter who offered her similar employment terms. The new...
Amid the ongoing conflict involving Israel, the United States and Iran, several rumours about Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu have begun circulating widely on social media. Multiple viral posts have...