Global recruiting: How to find and hire the right talent worldwide

Global recruiting gives a benefit of finding the best talents from anywhere in the world.

In the year 2019, technology will keep advancing, the world will get even smaller with faster connections, and thus global recruitment is more than a serious option for companies. There are many ways to approach international recruiting – such as video recruitment, mobile recruitment, and social media recruitment – but all companies want to take the steps which lead to recruiting the best candidates before others. How should HR approach their global recruiting in order to find the best out of the best?

Find the countries with new talent waves

In international recruitment, people can be hired literally from anywhere in the world. This offers an enormous amount of options for possible candidates but also makes it harder to find the needle from the haystack. The newly advanced BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are the places where HR should turn their attention to.

On top of that,  Goldman Sachs Group – banking, securities, and investment management firm – has introduced the "Next-11" or N-11. N-11 is a list of eleven emerging markets that could potentially rival G7: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, and Vietnam. This is where HR management should turn their attention to if they wish to be the first to find and attract the top candidates.

Don’t forget women

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and The United Arab Emirates are surging millions of highly educated women into the labor market. Unfortunately, this gigantic and ambitious talent pool is not currently tapped by employers, but men are still considered necessary in the battle of the best talents.

One reason, noted by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an expert on gender and workplace issues, in her book “Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets – Why Women are the solutions”, is that attracting and retaining talented women in emerging economies requires different strategies than those used in masculine markets.

However, the company that invests in this and takes the ambitious women as a serious addiction to the labor market will reap the benefits of highly educated employees.

Tailor your social media recruitment for the local market

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most used and most effective channels to find employee talents in the USA, Europe, and Australia. This isn’t, however, the case globally. Some countries have their own social platforms which are more effective in recruiting and employee engagement than this Western Trio.

For example, in Russia, Vkontakte is the most popular social media platform. In Japan, Twitter is one of the most common social media platforms people use. Meanwhile, in China, WeChat has over 1.08 billion monthly users, and an average Chinese uses the app for more than 70 minutes each day. Another Chinese social media platform, Weibo, reaches 340 million active users monthly and is popular especially among young white-collar workers and the urban online population.

So, to reach the local talents, you should approach them via the most popular social media platform used in that specific country. American Press Institute says that around 88 % of Millennials are using social media daily. If you are trying to catch a millennial's attention, then you should consider using social media. 

Understand the local culture

Ways of working and acting in a job vary from culture to culture. By understanding the culture where you are hiring candidates gives you the benefit of getting the best out of the candidates’ talents and helps your candidates to fit in. By understanding the local culture, you can guide your new foreign employees into your company culture – and also prepare for any possible problems beforehand.

For example, in Japan, an employee can’t leave the workplace before their superiors do. If they did, it would be seen as highly disrespectful and lazy. Thus, a Japanese employee will most likely stay in the office or in their remote work for extra hours each day to make sure they are not offending their superiors.

For understanding the local culture, these six questions should be looked at in recruiting:

1. Distance to Power Index: How individuals relate to power and hierarchy

2. Individualism vs. Collectivism: Whether the individual or the group is more important

3. Uncertainty Avoidance: How much comfort with uncertainty does society have

4. Masculinity vs. Femininity: Whether a society tends to have more “tough or tender” values

5. Long-term vs. Short-term Orientation: How far into the future do most people focus

6. Indulgence vs. Restraint: The value of self-discipline in a society

Realize that remote work is here to stay

In the modern world, employees don’t need to be in the same office or even in the same country. With technology, it is possible to follow, report, participate, discuss, negotiate, weigh and brainstorm with co-workers without being in the same space.

As for global recruiting, working remotely saves the hassle of working visas and immigration. Hired candidates can start working pretty much immediately without long waiting times. Reaching and supervising them is easy with different work-related applications, like Slack, Toggl, and Asana.

Offering the global workforce a possibility to work remotely increase the candidates’ interest. Many employees aren’t keen to move to another country for personal reasons; family, hobbies, children’s school and friends, familiar living environment, and so on.

Take advantage of technology

As laptops, mobile phones and tablets are at our reach on daily basis, it’s easy to handle the whole recruiting process remotely. Don’t hesitate to approach your recruitment with a customizable video recruiting tool, which is fast, easy to use for both parties, and gives HR a possibility to see the candidates. With a video tool, recruiting is not a faceless act and it works better than old-fashioned recruiting.

Video recruitment tools have an in-built commenting and rating system, so if wanted, the whole group of recruiters or the company’s employees can discuss the candidates to find the best match for the open job. The current Millennial workforce has grown up with videos and they have used and are comfortable with technology-based recruitment tools.

When it comes to technologies, companies operating in the EU should also mind about The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR aims primarily to give control back to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.

Companies need to clearly inform their customers about the following things:

• What data does the company have

• Where the data is located

• For what usage is the data collected

• Who has administration rights for the collected data

• Who has access to the collected data

• How does the data move between different programs

• How can an individual achieve, correct or remove all stored data

As mobile phones are a part of our daily lives, it would be simply stupid to not make your recruitment mobile friendly. Make sure the applicant can send you their resume and CV easily as a link, for example via DropBox. Your application form should be easy to read and fill in with mobile. Don’t forget to make your company’s webpage mobile-friendly, too.

War for talent requires our recruitment processes to be lean and optimized. Test yours to find out if it's up for the battle with Modern Recruitment Checklist and you're 1 step closer to become lean.