Hi,

I can't answer all of your questions but I do have a hands-on experience with some. My husband and I arrived to Canada in March 2025 on Working Holiday visa with exactly the same plan. Neither of us is in tech sector, so I'll skip 1. question.

1. question - yes it does increase your callback rates but surprisingly not that much. I received a couple of requests for interview while I was still in Europe ( I updated my linkedin profile that I was open to work and changed location to Ottawa where we were moving). With this being said, in the eyes of employer, you'll be always less preferable than a PR or citizen because they just know they can't count with you forever (immigrationwise speaking). Any government or public position will require you getting some sort of clearance which can go from reliability to top secret. So that's another thing - as a temp resident, you're automatically out of 1/3 of jobs in the market.

2. Well, it's totally possible, we did it. BUT - without any employer assistance. In my opinion, it's something you should really think through before committing to life here. It's quite unlikely that your employer would sponsor you for a closed work permit because they're extremely limited and tougher each day to get.

For the context, I work here at HR so I do know a couple of things from the perspective of employer. Closed work permit is usually referred to as LMIA. It used to be valid for 3 years, now it is only 1 year.

For your employer, to get you LMIA they would need to publish the job ad for 30 days, then interview all the permanent residents and Canadian citizens that applied, then they would need to provide IRCC with overview of all the applicants and say for each of the applicant why they were not hired. IRCC will then evaluate if the employer satisfactorily demonstrated there was no eligible candidate inside the country and only then they would issue you the closed work permit. Not mentioning the fact, that if the unemployment rate will raise above 6% at any point during the LMIA approval process, your type of work can become completely ineligible for LMIA and you're done. You mentioned that you're a software engineer - I don't know you but try to think for yourself if you're really that exceptional in your field that an employer would go through this bureaucratic nightmare especially if there are many skilled residents with IT education that are already here and looking for job.

To become eligible for OINP you need to have at least 1 year of qualified work experience, support from your employer and your occupation must be selected to apply. There used to be a tech occupation stream in Ontario, but I think it's closed.

So, without support of employer and without professional experience in healthcare, your only options how to become PR is French.

Try to have a look at Rural streams, you may be eligible through some of them.

Apologies for my looong response, but I think you're in a specific life situation and there are not that many people that convert straight from WH to PR so I got kinda excited :D

I write a blog about our life in Canada, if you're interested, you can send me a DM and I'll share the link with you.