Pre-Employment Mentoring Programs and Immigrant Labor Market Integration

Employment is one of the priorities for immigrants upon arrival in the receiving country. However, the job search process is often challenging, and structural barriers negatively impact the employment outcomes of immigrants. Facilitated by immigrant-serving organizations (ISOs), sometimes in partnership with employing organizations, pre-employment mentoring programs have emerged as a key intervention to facilitate immigrants’ labor market integration in Canada. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and archival data, we critically examine the benefits and challenges of pre-employment mentoring programs. While beneficial for multiple stakeholders (e.g., immigrants, mentors, employers, and ISOs), pre-employment mentoring programs encounter a series of challenges, including mentor-protégé mismatches, perceived lack of commitment to the mentoring relationships, and unmet expectations. The programs’ reliance on volunteering and stakeholders’ varying understandings and expectations of mentoring contribute to these challenges, resulting in inconsistent mentoring outcomes. The study reinforces ISOs’ critical but constrained role in facilitating immigrants’ access to mentoring at the pre-employment stage. It also highlights the importance of understanding how contextual factors influence formal mentoring outcomes.