Once upon a time….

In 1995 Whistler hit a growth spurt.  The beautiful little mountain town was busy building its first High School and cutting the ribbon on what would become Marketplace and Town Plaza centres.  The resort was buzzing:  World Cup was coming,  the hotels were booking out and local housing was scarce.

The Sea to Sky urgently needed fresh workforce talent to support Whistler’s evolution. Entrepreneur and visionary, Cathy Goddard, took notice and wisely founded Whistler’s Personnel Solutions, a company dedicated to “filling shoes” for local businesses.

“When I started, most Whistler businesses had no idea what an employment agency actually did so there was a lot of groundwork needed to explain how it all worked” 
Cathy Goddard, Founder

In the early days,  Cathy was focused on recruiting skilled professionals, particularly for accounting, administration, and management roles.  Whistler Personnel’s temp staffing services were a brand new concept at the time and required even more nurturing to educate business owners on the benefits of filling staffing gaps with skilled temp workers.

Cathy looks back at the decade that she spent building Whistler’s Personnel Solutions with great fondness and said: “it stands out as a true career highlight for me…  (it was) a meaningful role in the Sea to Sky business community and (provided) endless opportunities to learn, stretch and grow.”   

Building Lasting Connections

During the fall of 1995, not long after the company was launched, Cathy interviewed was a young job applicant who had just moved to Whistler named Jacki Bissillion.   With Cathy’s help, Jacki landed a position as a hotel manager for Powder Resort Properties and their friendship was born.   Over the next two decades, Jacki transitioned from candidate to client, engaging Whistler’s Personnel Solutions’ recruiting services to fill key positions at hotels and other businesses she managed.  (Spoiler alert – Jacki is  the current Owner of Whistler Personnel Solutions ~ did anyone notice that she dropped the ‘s?)

 “All of the people Whistler Personnel recruited for us were total rock stars and I still count many of them as friends today including Karen Wooton, Bob Brant and Maria Cecutti.   I was a total superfan of Whistler Personnel right from the start. They certainly had a knack for playing match-maker! “

Jacki Bissillion, Owner

Cathy Goddard

Sabine Bell

In 2008, Cathy was eager to pursue a new entrepreneurial dream (Lighthouse Visionary, a coaching and mentoring service).   Cathy was determined to find a new owner who shared her beliefs and sold the company to long term local and CPHR professional Sabine Bell.  “It mattered deeply to me that the new owner would carry it forward with the same tenets and values I had poured into it,” said Cathy,  “Sabine Bell was absolutely that person.”   

Prior to picking up the Whistler Personnel torch, Sabine had served as the human resources director at the Pan Pacific Whistler and the Delta Whistler Resort. Her background as a  human resources manager and consultant in the hospitality sector brought a fresh perspective.   But most importantly, Sabine also shared Cathy’s passion  for helping people to achieve their career goals as well as enabling businesses develop a strong workforce that would lead them to success.

The Start of Something New

In 2015 Sabine was ready to rebrand and rebuild Whistler Personnel, which had been delving more and more into the HR consulting realm since the 2010 Olympics.   After a short period of relative calm, the resort was again booming and businesses were once again struggling with high turnover and severe labour shortages.   Sabine wanted to rebuild the Recruiting and Temp Services Divisions which had been taking a back seat for a while but she was just too busy to do it alone.   She shared this dream with a friend over lunch one fateful day ~ Jacki was now running Red Bus Communications, a brand strategy, marketing and communications company.  They were both excited by the potential of reinventing  and expanding Whistler Personnel to solve the workforce challenges of a new era so they decided to work on it together.

“I was constantly hearing from  local business owners and managers who were hugely successful that they were burning out and even considering closing shop.  They were working around the clock and desperately needed a break,” 

Jacki Bissillion, Owner

Strategically, they decided to move away from a traditional percentage-based pricing model and make the recruiting services way more affordable and accessible for small business.  They expanded the Temp Division to include cleaners, labourers, carpenters, night auditors, bookkeepers and other resort workers so they could offer immediate staffing relief.  They built a modernized website that integrated an innovative local job board with a new candidate database,  automated the application process and streamlined the entire recruiting process.   And as the final cherry on top, they introduced an inquizitive and memorable blue owl as the new face of organization.

A Team on a Mission

In 2017, Jacki officially purchased Whistler Personnel from Sabine who by then was very busy as the full time human resources manager at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler.  Jacki quickly brought on a few new partners of her own including Wendy Kendall, who had just sold  Blenz Coffee Shop and was intimately familiar with the constant labour challenges of  running a small business in a very busy world-class ski resort.    Serendipitously, Wendy had worked as a temp through-out university so she had plenty of ideas about how a great temp agency could work.   She agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to help Jacki with the rapidly growing Temp Worker Division for the summer.

With the help of Payroll Coordinator, Olga Achiadi, and Recruiting Guru,  Shannon Wiles, the newly reinvented Temp Division hired over 270 temp workers, filled more than 550 cleaning, childcare, activity, event, serving, construction, cooking and office shifts in Whistler, Squamish and Pemberton that summer.   Plus they sent out over $100,000 in paycheques to local families and workers who were enthralled about finding a very flexible, novel way to make ends meet.   The team knew they were on to something that could really make a positive difference in their community both to understaffed employers as well as individual looking for extra income.

“Once we started getting to know our temp employees and hearing their stories, we realized that while helping local businesses keep the doors open was super rewarding, giving local workers an easy way to earn extra incomes so they could stay in this fabulous town was even better!  Especially now, with cost of living hitting extreme levels, these two missions are even more vital for our community and they are still what drive us.”

Jacki Bissillion, Owner

A Squamish Owlet is Born

In 2018, the Squamish community was also feeling the increasing impacts of a regional labour shortage.    Whistler Personnel had been recruiting for Squamish businesses all along ~ especially in the construction sector as both communities were experiencing incredible expansion and growth.   More and more Squamish businesses were reaching out for help.  So, thanks to a little nudge by a couple of core team members who happened to live there,  Ashley Pereira and Chantall Howard-Wearn,  Squamish Personnel Solutions was born – complete with a new logo, website and a baby sister owl who is very handy with tools.   Over the next couple of years, more and more businesses, hotels, shops, restaurants, construction firms and event companies starting relying on Whistler and Squamish Personnel to fill the gaps. 

“Anytime we reached out to a business with a job vacancy to see if they wanted help, they almost always said “YES ~ please help!”

Jacki Bissillion, Owner.  

Fostering Community and Connections are at our Core

Since its inception, Whistler and Squamish Personnel have been connecting people and fostering lasting relationships that ensure the communities they belong to are thriving.  Helping others with integrity, dependability, and equality have always been at the heart of the company’s culture.  Every day, the team does what they can to help job seekers build their best lives while also enabling local businesses, events and non-profits to achieve success with perfect-fit talent when they need it most.   

  “We try to meet with every applicant and hear their story so we can place them in a role that fits their unique needs and lifestyle.    We also work closely with our clients every step of the way and do not quit until the job they have open is successfully filled,” Jacki reflects,   “It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to serve our community in this way“

In honour of its 30th Birthday, the company decided to do a little math and discovered to their amazement that they have screened, interviewed and connected with over 19,000 job applicants,  placed over 3,800 successful hires and filled over 267,000 hours of temp labour.  The team continues to pursue their big, audacious dream of helping each person who applies with them to find meaningful work they enjoy.  And they believe that this, in turn, allows Squamish Personnel to resolve labour shortages for our community and ensure that local businesses can achieve organizational success for many more years to come.

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Click here to read some of our successful connections from over the years:    Candidate Success Stories   &   Client Success Stories