Throughout my human resources career I have done a lot of recruiting. Recruiters have many different ways to source candidates. My favourite? When someone I know recommends an applicant. 

This works well for two reasons. First, the person who is referring the candidate is likely familiar with my business and has a basic understanding of what I'm looking for. Second, when they recommend someone they are putting their name on the line, so the candidate comes with a built in recommendation. 

That's great for the recruiter. What about the candidate?

It wasn’t that long ago that the cannabis industry was considered to be a fringe industry. I remember when I co-founded this blog in 2010 how many of my friends and family thought it was silly. To be fair, not only was I jumping into the marijuana world when the blog started, I was also starting a blog. Blogs are very common now, but back then, they weren’t so much. My how things have changed for both blogs and the cannabis industry!

Cannabis legalization challenges a lot of the norms we have held to be true. It has been considered an illegal drug for decades and hasn't been allowed in the workplace.

Legalization of medical cannabis has been the first challenge for employers and legal recreational use brings up many more questions.

The thing that's unique about cannabis is it has both medical and recreational uses. This means there have to be two sets of rules in the workplace – accommodating medical use and restricting recreational usage.

We have established in past articles that employers have a duty to accommodate medical cannabis in the workplace when a patient has a valid prescription.

Recreational consumers will have different rules than medical ones

This very second, Silicon Valley startups are doing what they do best: working out how to grab a piece of the booming market in marijuana. Confident Cannabis, for example, is one start-up that’s put out a call for coders and techies to develop their front and backend software. Their aim is primarily making getting high “as easy as ordering delivery food.”

Raychel Young woke up early Saturday morning, placed her photography portfolio full of high-resolution prints of marijuana flowers into a large yellow envelope and headed to San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom.

She talked to hiring managers, alongside an estimated 2,500 other eager applicants who passed through the ballroom throughout the day, hoping to embark on new careers in the marijuana industry at what event organizers called the largest cannabis industry job fair ever.

OK. So it’s not a tester job, duh, but Confident Cannabis is looking for front and backend developers in San Francisco and this is actually a chance to be part of a pretty cool social experiment, as much as being close to the green stuff.

As legislators across the world, most notably in the US, are taking another look at whether prohibition of weed has ever really made economic or social sense, Silicon Valley startups are doing what they do best – working out how to grab a piece of this growing market.

On April 12, 2016, Economist Beau Whitney and cannabis industry consultant Sam Chapman announced the release of their new cannabis industry report, “Oregon Cannabis Jobs Report: Retail Sales and Job Creation in Oregon’s Burgeoning Cannabis Sector.”

From Dec. 9, 2015, until Jan. 16, 2016, the Oregon Cannabis Jobs Report surveyed state cannabis dispensaries registered with the Oregon Health Authority, with the data anonymized and collected confidentially.

Objectivity is important

Know any budding journalists looking for work?

A job notice posted Monday by The Cannabist — a groundbreaking specialist website launched by The Denver Post as Colorado in 2014 legalized the commercial sale of cannabis for recreational use — may have an opportunity.

Not long ago, you 100 percent had to 'know a guy,' or a girl, in order to find work in the marijuana industry. Then, you had to watch patiently and do a lot of internet research, often under furtive, less-than-ideal conditions , before starting to actually make money. 

But with 23 states and the District of Columbia legalizing marijuana in some form, and Canada poised to follow suit, the sketchy dealings formerly required to get a gig are as passé as the stigma around marijuana use. Working in the cannabis industry is increasingly like working anywhere else - and that includes the tedium of trawling through job postings.

To find out where this past weekend’s Marijuana Job Fair was being held, you had to text a guy—because of course you did.

The crowd lined up outside 15 Mercer Street in Toronto’s Entertainment District early Sunday afternoon suggested hundreds had done so in hopes of landing a job in an industry poised for growth, as pot legalization—part of the Liberals’ platform in the last federal election—eventually approaches.

Inside, anyone expecting kiosks and brochures would have been disappointed. Although if the absence of resumes in the hands of attendees and the smell of pot wafting down the street were any indication, it’s doubtful many were upset by the laid-back setup.