A story about a very bright red shirt, a nervous mock interview, and what actually happens in the space between finding someone a job and helping them build a life.
Our team meets twice a week, and somehow we always have so much to share updates about people finding housing, landing interviews, starting new jobs, or reaching a milestone that a few months ago felt impossible. But every once in a while, someone tells a story that makes the whole room stop. Not because it’s the biggest outcome or the most impressive number, but because it speaks so clearly to what we actually value.
A few days ago, Hager Bekursion one of our employer consultants shared one of those stories with us.
A phone call, and a good kid
Soheil, one of the refugee claimants we support, was looking for work. Hager, one of our employer consultants, knew an employer at FreshCo and picked up the phone. She didn’t talk about Soheil like another résumé she was trying to place. She spoke about someone she knew and cared about.
“This is a good kid. His attitude is amazing.”
Hager, to the employer
Right after that call, Soheil had an interview.
From a program perspective, that was already a good outcome. An employer contacted, a résumé shared, an interview secured in a matter of minutes. But as Hager kept telling the story, it became clear that getting the interview was actually the easy part.
The shirt
The interview was the next day, so Hager asked Soheil if he had something appropriate to wear. He confidently said yes. She told him to go upstairs, put on exactly what he planned to wear, and come back down.
He came back wearing a very bright red shirt.
Hager looked at him and said, “Son, what is this?”
Suddenly everyone around them was involved. It felt less like an employment worker prepping a client, and more like a family getting one of their kids ready for his first big interview. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was laughing. Soheil, grinning, went back upstairs to try again and returned in a thick winter jacket, entirely wrong for an August interview. More laughter. Back he went again.
Eventually, with Hager and Beku helping, they landed on the outfit. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Soheil started doing his famous little dance-walk across the room. Hager tried to imitate him and nearly hurt herself. By then, everyone was laughing.
What we love about this story isn’t really the shirt. It’s what was happening around the shirt. Soheil wasn’t made to feel embarrassed for not knowing what to wear. Nobody stood over him correcting him, or implied he should already know these things. They figured it out together, with humour and affection. Hager said something during the meeting that stayed with all of us:
“You need to love them as they are.”
Hager, Employer Consultant
Switching the exercise
Then came interview prep. Hager knew the employer and had a good sense of what Soheil would likely be asked. They started a mock interview but she noticed him getting nervous. Instead of pushing through the questions because that was the exercise, she changed the whole thing.
“I switched it because I see nervousness in him,” she told us. Then, to Soheil:
“Now you become the employer, and now you ask me questions.”
Almost immediately, he relaxed.
This small moment says a lot about how we think about employment support at Impakt. Hager wasn’t trying to successfully deliver a mock interview. She was trying to help Soheil feel ready for a real one. When she saw the approach wasn’t working for him, she changed it — she paid attention to the person, not the process.
The work between the referral and the outcome
We’ve started calling this the work between the referral and the outcome.
Making a referral or sending a résumé can happen in minutes. What happens afterward is often where the real work lives — preparing for an interview, figuring out what to wear, explaining a piece of workplace culture that may be unfamiliar, helping someone read an email, practising a hard conversation with a manager, navigating a language barrier, or simply being there when someone isn’t sure what to do next.
The relationship between Hager and Soheil makes this even clearer. Hager calls him her son. At one point, Soheil introduced her to his mother over WhatsApp and told her, “I have a mother. I have another mother now.” Hager told us she had to hold back tears — everyone had been laughing, and she didn’t want to change the happiness of the moment.
It would be easy to read that as a sweet story with nothing to do with employment. We see it differently. At Impakt, the relationship isn’t separate from the intervention the relationship is often what makes the intervention possible.
When people trust you, they can tell you what they don’t understand. They can admit they’re nervous, or that they’ve never been to an interview before. They can ask a question they’d feel embarrassed asking someone they barely know. Later, when something happens at work, they’re far more likely to call before a small misunderstanding becomes a much bigger problem.
“You need to have patience with them. There’s no difference between them and me. You need to understand and be welcoming, and also you need to love people. Without loving people, I don’t think I’d be able to do this job.”
Hager, on her approach
Why we don’t separate the programs
That’s also at the heart of our Integrated Newcomer Services (INS) model. We don’t experience people’s lives as separate programs called employment, housing, mental health and community because that’s not how people experience their own lives.
Someone can find a job and still be unable to leave shelter because their income isn’t enough for rent. Someone can have every skill a position requires but struggle with anxiety in an unfamiliar interview. Someone can be working full-time while dealing with isolation, language barriers, transportation, workplace expectations, or the responsibility of supporting family back home.
Our role is to understand the whole picture. Sometimes employment is the most urgent need. Sometimes housing is what’s in the way. Sometimes what someone needs most is confidence, community, or a person they trust enough to call. Our Cultural Ambassadors are essential to this — they don’t just connect people to services. They build relationships, understand what’s happening in someone’s life, and stay close as things change.
Is he misunderstanding that he got a job or not?
Soheil’s story continued after the interview. Hager had told him to call as soon as it finished, but hours passed with no word. She started worrying because of the language barrier, she wasn’t completely sure he’d understood what the employer told him.
“I was nervous as well,” she said. “I said, ‘Is he misunderstanding that he got a job or not?'”
Eventually, Hager called the employer herself. The manager confirmed Soheil had done well he’d been hired, with full-time hours available. We celebrated. But even getting the job isn’t where our work ends.
The first few months in a new job matter enormously. People may need help understanding schedules, benefits, workplace expectations, or how to talk to a supervisor. Sometimes they just need someone they trust enough to call and say, “This happened today what do you think?” Staying connected during that stretch is often what turns getting a job into becoming stable in it.
In that same meeting, Hager gave us an update on another former client she’d supported months earlier he’d now passed probation and received a benefits package. He didn’t fully understand the paperwork, so he called Hager, and she walked him through it. What excited her wasn’t the paperwork. It was what it represented: he hadn’t just found a job. He’d stayed, passed probation, and was becoming established.
A pathway, not a placement
Once someone is stable, our conversations with them change again, we start asking what they want next.
Many of the refugees and newcomers we work with arrive in Canada with years of education, professional experience and skill. Their first Canadian job may have very little to do with the career they had before coming here and that’s okay. Sometimes that first job is exactly what someone needs in the moment: an income, and a start on Canadian experience. We respect what that first opportunity provides, without assuming it has to define the rest of someone’s professional life.
A few months later, we might help someone update their résumé with new experience, look for better-paying work, explore training or certification, take on more responsibility where they are, or begin finding a path back toward their original profession.
This is why we think about employment as a pathway rather than a placement. We want people to find work but we also want them to stay, grow, build confidence and experience, and eventually have more choices about the kind of work they do.
We can measure a lot of that journey: résumés, interviews, employer connections, jobs, retention, progression. Those numbers matter. But stories like Soheil’s remind us there’s another layer underneath, one that’s much harder to put into a spreadsheet, patience, humour, trust, advocacy, cultural understanding, and having someone beside you who genuinely cares what happens next.
That’s why this story stayed with us.
The referral opens the door. The relationship helps someone walk through it.
And sometimes, walking through that door starts with a very bright red shirt and a room full of people, laughing with you, while they help you get ready.
