What Makes a Job Offer Genuine to LMIA Assessors

Somewhere in a Facebook group, someone is posting a job offer letter from a Canadian employer they've never spoken to on a video call, asking if it "looks legit." It's worth sitting with what makes a job offer genuine to LMIA assessors — and why that's so hard to judge from a letter alone, when a government assessor checks things a hopeful applicant usually can't.

It's the employer's application

A Labour Market Impact Assessment is filed by the employer with Employment and Social Development Canada. That single fact reframes the whole thing: the offer you're holding isn't proof of anything until the employer's own application has been through a process you have no visibility into. An employer who genuinely intends to hire has already committed time and a real processing fee before you ever see the offer. An employer who hasn't started that process, or never intends to, can still email you a letter.

What Service Canada actually looks at

The core question assessors work through is whether hiring a temporary foreign worker would have a neutral or positive effect on the Canadian labour market — which in practice breaks down into things like whether the employer genuinely advertised the role, at a wage that matches or exceeds the local median for that occupation, and whether the business itself is a real, operating concern rather than a shell used to move paperwork through. This is a business's legal and financial standing under review.

Proving the business can actually pay

Part of what's assessed is whether the employer has the financial capacity to pay the wage it's offering — a business that exists on paper but has no real revenue or operating history raises exactly the kind of question an assessor is there to catch. This is one of the harder things to fake convincingly, because it requires supporting business documentation, not just a job description and a signature.

The signs worth noticing from the outside

You won't see the employer's LMIA file, but a few patterns are worth treating as flags rather than proof either way: an offer that arrives before any real interview process, pressure to accept quickly, vague or shifting details about the actual role, and — this is the one to take most seriously — any request for money in exchange for the offer or the LMIA itself. It is illegal in Canada for an employer or a recruiter to charge a worker for a job or for an LMIA. Legitimate recruitment fees are paid by the employer, never by the candidate. If money is changing hands in the other direction, that alone tells you the arrangement isn't a genuine one, regardless of how official the paperwork looks.

Why the genuineness test exists at all

It isn't there to make life hard for South African applicants specifically — it's there because the LMIA process is the mechanism that lets an employer bypass hiring locally, and Canada has an obvious interest in that mechanism not being used to launder pay-to-play job offers into work permits. Reading that as the system's actual purpose, rather than as an obstacle, makes the caution around unfamiliar offers easier to hold onto.

An offer that survives real scrutiny — proper interviews, a verifiable business, no request for payment — isn't automatically approved. But an offer that skips all of that isn't genuine no matter how the letter reads.

Cape2Canada's free Work Permits & LMIA Basics guide covers how real Canadian job offers work and how to spot the scams, if you want the fuller picture before you respond to anything.