But this was Toronto, which has always been a problem-solving kind of place -- especially when it comes to employment. Tan connected with the Career Edge Organization, a not-for-profit founded in 1996 by Toronto icon David Pecault and other business leaders to help young and immigrant job-seekers get a start though internships. It's familiar to many of Greater Toronto's Top Employers -- representatives of several sit on its board.

Through a Career Edge internship program for professionals, Tan landed a placement at George Brown College, also one of Greater Toronto's Top Employers. It was all she needed. The placement led to a contract post in project management, then to a full-time position. "And the rest is history," she laughs. Now, after several promotions, she is Senior Operations Manager in the college's Division of Community Services and Health Sciences. "I am very grateful to the people who supported me," she says. "This was literally opening doors. Without that, I might have had to go back to Singapore."

It's a classic example of how Greater Toronto employers work to find solutions, improve business, and inevitably, make the metropolis an even better environment for employees. That is all the more essential in light of the recently released statistics from Canada's 2016 census, which showed that more than half of Toronto people now identify themselves as visible minorities -- 51.5 per cent, to be exact.

Greater Toronto's immense diversity has always been one of its oft-cited for employers. "It's the No. 1 change in the past 20 years," says Anton Rabie, Co-Founder, Chairman and Co-CEO of the Toronto toy and entertainment company Spin Master Inc., a Top Employer which he helped start just over 20 years ago, in 1994. "Diversity drives such great decision-making. It really helps our innovation and in spawning ideas."

But Rabie is the first to agree that Greater Toronto has many other strengths for employers. "There is such a lot of creative talent," he notes. "I don't think the city gets the credit that it should. Look at how many boutique studios we have. We have the number one pre-school TV show in the world, 'PAW Patrol', and the animation is all done at Guru Studio on Spadina."

Then there is the way solutions-based Toronto has built up its technology workforce, now rivalling neighbouring Kitchener-Waterloo and helping to fuel many of Greater Toronto's Top Employers, from Citi Canada, part of the global bank, to Toronto-based software-maker FreshBooks. That factor played directly into the recent announcement by Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, that after a global search, it had chosen Toronto to build a 12-acre, high-tech urban development on the eastern waterfront. In conceiving a futuristic neighbourhood for employers and residents, replete with autonomous vehicles and the latest urban thinking, the project would be "tapping into Toronto's already-thriving tech sector," said the announcement.

Another key element in Greater Toronto's success as a high-end employment centre is the prevalence of post-secondary institutions, which feed highly educated young people into the workforce and often form partnerships with employers. "There are so many organizations you can work with here," says Leslie Quinlan, Vice-President Human Resources and Organizational Development at George Brown College. "And because we have so many educational institutions and so many streams, we have an opportunity to really help shape what the students learn and help them be successful, knowing what industry wants."

It all makes for a highly competitive struggle among employers to land, as Quinlan says, "the best and brightest" who are attracted to Greater Toronto. "I think it does drive employers to be good employers, because people in Toronto have options," she says. "Employers want to keep the talent that they have, and to do that they need to think about, how I am going to develop these people, how am I going to let them know I value them, how do I give them opportunities to grow and have a say in their workplace?"

And that, of course, is what Greater Toronto's Top Employers seeks to measure -- who are the best of the best in that highly competitive marketplace? "The bar is raised a little bit in different areas each year," says Richard Yerema, Managing Editor for Mediacorp Canada and the list's chief number-cruncher. "We have a 15 to 20 per cent annual change in the list. In a given industry category, we might hear that a competitor to last year's group has changed its vacation policy or its tuition support, or it has added a new program. So now it is included and one of the others has to drop off. To be recognized as one of Greater Toronto's Top Employers, you cannot stand still."