That would be a tall order in Silicon Valley or Research Triangle. How about if you were in Hong Kong, the hiring executive is in San Francisco, the job is in China, and the req asks for Chinese-speaking, retail-savvy, online experienced, e-commerce marketers?

Simon Heaton, Walmart’s managing director in Asia, admits it isn’t easy. It was, he says, “difficult to do and difficult to repeat.” Yet, starting with a “a good clear brief as to what was needed,” Heaton and his team assembled a group of candidates, qualified them, and had everything ready when the decision-maker flew in for the interviews.

At the end of that six weeks, Walmart’s new e-commerce group for China was hired and onboarded. “It requires good alignment,” Heaton modestly explains.

Not even a year ago Heaton was working in Bentonville, Arkansas. Today, he’s building Walmart’s executive team in India, China, Japan, and wherever next in Asia the company grows.

Heaton made the move during a particularly trying time for Walmart Asia. In the spring, 24 of the company’s stores were in the area of the 9.0 earthquake to hit Japan. In the fall, the Chongqing city government shuttered 13 of the company’s stores for 15 days and fined the company in connection with food mislabeling and handling violations. Two of the company’s top executives resigned immediately after the penalties were announced.

Yet in the months since Heaton arrived he opened Walmart’s first Asia recruiting office, brought in a recruiting team, and filled several senior positions in Asia. He manages global executive recruiting and helps with best practices for the recruiting teams in each country. “We’re a bit of a center of excellence for them,” Heaton says.

Filling such senior positions — whether e-commerce, or, more commonly, VPs, SVPs, and occasionally senior or executive director — is not an easy task. The group’s focus is primarily external recruiting, and his most important tools are all social media, especially LinkedIn.

The UK native has been a headhunter as well as a corporate recruiter, and has recruited professionals from all over the world during his 20-year career. “It’s much easier to find people, people with specific talents, than it used to be,” Heaton explains.

In China and India in particular, he says, the corporate retail market is not well established. Finding executives with the background and the cultural knowledge necessary to be successful often means his team searches for expats with retail training.

“It’s much different than when all I had was a Rolodex,” says Heaton. Now, his team will typically turn to LinkedIn first to scour the planet to find the kind of professionals Walmart needs to be successful as it expands globally. Not all expats want to return to their home country; others simply aren’t interested in retail.

“I’m not going to go in with a hard sell to convince someone who doesn’t want to return,” say Heaton. Enough do, making repatriation a key source for the senior positions Heaton fills.

One of the things that surprised him about recruiting overseas is how many people are connected to each other online. At a party thrown by a Hong Kong neighbor, he discovered several people with whom he had either a first- or second-degree connection. “Here,” he says, “You can quickly find someone who knows someone … people are very willing to share their network.”

Even early in his career back in the United Kingdom, Heaton knew he wanted to work globally. “I’ve always wanted to do a global role,” he says. To prepare, he would volunteer for projects that had a global component, and take on searches for overseas candidates or jobs.

“You kind of get a reputation for doing that kind of work,” he explains. So when an opportunity comes along, experience and reputation position you for the job.

That’s the path he recommends for others interested in working globally. “Put your hand up and volunteer to do the work,” he advises.”Network with your teams and colleagues. Help them when you can.”

With Walmart expanding rapidly — some reports, Heaton notes, say the company plans to nearly double in size to 4.3 million workers — there will be a need for talented in-house recruiters in the months and years ahead. Right now, he notes, the next recruiting team is being built for Latin America. Spanish is one of the requirements.

“Globalization is going to continue,” Heaton says. And that means opportunities for recruiters who want to work abroad will expand. Start building the contacts and developing the experience and smarts now for those overseas jobs in the future.

“The first contact is not always when you have a job,” Heaton says. He’s speaking specifically of how his Walmart team works, but his comments are relevant for recruiters thinking of an overseas career. “Make those contacts and stay connected.”

Over 20 years I’ve learned that these assumptions in a global context rarely pay off. I often hear people say things like “Singapore is similar to Hong Kong because they are both in Asia”; or “Italy is similar to France because they are close to each other and in Europe.” Well, that is sort of like thinking the United States of America is similar to Mexico because they’re both part of the Americas. I think many of us in North America would shake our heads at this comparison, but it is not uncommon to develop plans based on what we know, and then take a few assumptions about the target location expecting to excel. Wrong! What works in our own space doesn’t necessarily translate when you cross a border, ocean, or even a region. At times, it can feel like you’ve brought your baseball bat to a cricket game — yes, the function seems the same, but without understanding the game, the home run is much more difficult to achieve.

This is why I’ve called on two of my esteemed peers, Danielle Monaghan and Roel Lambrichts, to join me at the upcoming ERE Expo Spring 2012 in San Diego for an open dialogue about creating and sustaining talent acquisition success on a global scale. Essentially, we’re inviting everyone to have coffee with us and join the discussion. I chose this type of session and dynamic presenter group because of the diverse backgrounds and global companies that have benefited from our expertise. Danielle is the HR director North Asia – Greater China, Japan, & Korea at Cisco Systems, based out of Beijing. Roel is the head of talent acquisition Europe for Coca-Cola Enterprises based out of Brussels.

You may have experienced the kinds of things we’re talking about here. If not, it’s likely you will in the future as companies continue to globalize. While “global recruiting” is a currently a buzzword in our profession, there is more to it than making some overseas calls and sifting through resumes. I know I made a lot of assumptions when I first started to recruit outside my own home region (more than 20 years ago); we all do.

I’ll never forget the “aha” moment when I realized the one-size-fits-all-model was not going to work.

I was the head of a large American organization expanding into Europe. I had to make a “quick” roundtrip flight from California to London — and this trip, I’d end up with my tail between my legs. I was going to admit failure and all I kept asking myself was, “How did I let things get this far?”

It all started because the division had needed a new head of human resources. For several months prior to my trip, despite the UK division’s pleas to follow some of the local recruiting protocol, I, as head of talent acquisition sitting in Los Angeles, insisted they do things our way. I thought I knew better. Without an in-house recruiting department, the UK managers recommended we rely on an outside, third-party agency. Nonsense, I responded. We have more than capable recruiters in the U.S.; let’s handle it for you our way. Let’s at least pay an outside agency to place an ad to generate CVs, they suggested. Why would I do that, I replied, when we can identify potential candidates and just call them directly ourselves?

They were appalled. You can’t do that, the local British team explained. “We don’t call people and directly recruit or source from other companies.” It was a territory battle and I didn’t even have the courtesy to set up conference calls on their time (Eight hours makes a big difference if there is no flexibility!).

As you may be guessing, I was not successful when I tried to do things my way and operate from the common American perspective that the world revolves around us.

It was an important lesson for me though — not only humbling, but eye-opening. I don’t think my mistakes were uncommon. Even the best talent acquisition professional falls into several traps. Think about if you have ever assumed that…

• Other places are just like where you live and regions are alike. Like my example above, we know Vancouver is not the same as Montreal, just as California is different from New York — it’s true on a global scale.
• Everyone speaks English. Think about your last vacation off the resort in Sao Paolo. Your choices were likely Portuguese or Spanish, not English.
• The same recruiting activity will work regardless of where you are. Think Internet reliability in the outskirts of Russia.
• The Internet is available to all people – think China (did you know LinkedIn is blocked there?).

And these mistakes are often innocently overlooked or not even considered. There are discussions in boardrooms all over the world about how to address global talent needs. Local recruiting and staffing processes are not consistent around the world, and there are significant differences from region to region as to how talent acquisition processes are executed.

I learned that all of the strategizing, planning, and developing programs to handle recruiting around the world often miss one important mark: although business is global, effective recruiting must always be local. You can do this in many ways and we’ll delve into several at the session. You may hear things like:

Creating a culture/country plan understanding what makes the recruiting culture unique in each country or region that you work, as well as how it might be customized.

Creating a candidate pool with awareness of how various countries use the web and technology to craft messages for candidate pools and help get the word to them.

Getting tech savvy, or more simplistic, to help you unearth specific gathering places. Some include typical social networking and media networks, but others include other unique applications.

Making people feel comfortable is a foundational activity for recruiters because it enables relationships to form. Think about how frustrated you get, sitting at home in Toronto or Chicago and calling to get an electronic gadget fixed, and you find yourself speaking to someone in India. The accent isn’t what you’re used to, and the speed, intonation, and even pronunciation is all foreign to you. Now make that feeling professional — you will likely feel skeptical, not trusting, and perhaps weary because for whatever reason there are no local representatives of the company available to speak with you.

So whether you’re working in Pan-European recruiting including the Middle East and Africa regions and you’re thinking about:

• Brand recognition outside the parent region and how you will develop your pipeline if direct applicants are low.
• Contractual obligations and work councils — for example, has your organization established the right work conditions for the French Works Council in France?
• If interview feedback is required and hiring managers are prepared; for example, in the UK, interview feedback is expected.
• Cultural gender norms carrying into the office; for example, women in Saudi Arabia cannot drive on their own, how you balance this with your desire to hire valuable female candidates.
• Language — can you support all 18 official languages in Europe? Is a multilingual recruiter enough to overcome stigma over a flawed accent?
• In the UK, age discrimination is a very sensitive issue. How will you cross-train and set standards when your recruiters in Argentina are looking at marital status, number of children, and looking at pictures on resumes, and your team here cannot learn anything personal about the candidate without being very cautious?

Or in Asia/Pacific recruiting, and you’re looking at;

• The competitive economy in the world’s second-largest economy and fifth-largest consumer market: China.
• Internet access and speed across the region and accessibility.
• The rapidly changing government policies and regulations that make China a new country every six months.
• Respect-based cultural norms and how to address people — like last/family name, followed by an “honorific” pronoun in places like Japan or Korea.

Or like many of us in one of the many diverse regions across the Americas:

• Competition is high, but many candidates may not be actively looking, and how will you find passive talent.
• Working within legal requirements, like not asking “Are you a U.S. citizen?” and instead asking, “Are you legally eligible to work in this country?”
• Compliance (like the alphabet soup of U.S. employment laws) and even the stigma of working in a neighboring county (there’s much more of a stigma with, say, an American working in Canada, then a French national working in Belgium, or a Thai national to be recruited to work in Malaysia).
• Dramatic climate changes: how can a near-Arctic organization attract those from warmer climates, and retain them?

It is likely that you will face some of the challenges we have seen. Join the conversation about the challenges and obstacles of cross-border recruiting, and the unique idiosyncrasies of cultural and legal differences within regions.

Danielle, Roel, and I are putting ourselves on the hot seat to talk about everything under the sun,  no matter what time zone you’re operating in. Let us come together as a local team in San Diego and talk about the global needs for recruiting that are inevitably local.

Feel free to leave us questions right up until March 19, 2012, and we will try to answer as many questions during our ERE Expo session.

See you in San Diego in 2012! Happy Holidays to everyone!

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

The site is being unveiled by a job-board group called The Network, along with a Dutch labor-market research agency called the Intelligence Group. It’s first available to Network customers and its partners such as Beyond.com, with access possibly opening up in 2012.

For an example of what’s up on the site, let’s take India. If you click on India, you can find out, among other things:

• the percentage of people willing to move within India
• the percent willing to work abroad
• how long, on average, they’ll stay abroad
• the sources (e.g. job boards) they’ll use when looking for a job abroad
• what they most want to know about a company they’d go work for
• people in India’s most important factors in deciding whether to take a new job

Like any survey results, these are only as good as the survey methodology. In this case, because many respondents to this online survey were job-board users, that’ll skew the source of hire a tad, and will include more candidates with bachelor and master degrees than the general population.

“The respondents are from job boards,” says Geert-Jan Waasdorp of the Intelligence Group, “so there is some bias. But we focus mainly on motives … we know in detail what drives people from country to country B and know how to reach them.”

Healthcare is expected to create 248,500 jobs this year, leading all other sectors including tech. But even as go-go as healthcare is, the pace of job creation there has subsided some.

Nothing surprising there, except that this is India we’re talking about, and not the U.S.

Ma Foi Randstad, the international HR service provider, says India’s torrid jobs growth is slowing up, though the numbers are still at a pace much of the world would envy. According to a Randstad survey of 13 industry sectors, 3rd quarter employment in those sectors was projected to grow by 353,900 workers. But a survey at the end of the quarter estimated the actual hires at 331,200, leading the company to headline its economic summary ”Indian Economy: sluggish but not panicky.“

Randstad’s quarterly surveys cover only a fraction of the country’s 478 million workers, more than half of whom work in agriculture. However the so-called “organized sectors” in the survey contribute a disproportionate share of the nation’s GDP, employing about 35.2 million workers.

As in the U.S., healthcare is the fastest growing of the 13 sectors in the Randstad survey. The company estimated employers would add some 63,800 workers in the 3rd quarter. It now estimates that 60,400 jobs were added.

Only two sectors showed above expected growth: Pharmaceuticals, where 1,300 more jobs than the original 11,300 are believed to have been added, and real estate and construction, which added 1,110 more jobs than the initial 29,600 estimate.

The tech sector, employing about 2 million workers, fell 9,000 jobs short of the 55,500 estimate.

Notes the Randstad survey, “many IT firms (are) becoming cautious in their hiring. This has been further accentuated by the decline in attrition rates since the economic downturn, which has come down to 15% from 25% in the last couple of quarters. Many of the firms are hiring based on their immediate project needs.”

One positive for U.S. and Canadian tech recruiters is that a slowdown in India should make recruiting overseas candidates a little easier. That should be especially true for companies hiring in-country workers to staff their overseas operations.

It should also lessen some of the impetus for H-1 engineers in the U.S. to return to India. Though U.S. companies have seen some Indian expats leave for jobs in their home country paying not much less than they were earning in the U.S., the exodus has been small. Now, with the declining value of the rupee, and the slower pace of hiring, that’s one less issue.

Despite the slower than expected job growth, and a slowdown in the growth of the GDP, from a high a few years ago of 9 percent annually to this year’s projected 7.5 percent, Randstad’s report says “the long term growth story of India is still intact.”

Adds Randstad, “even though a deceleration in job growth rates is now being experienced, in the longer term the economy still retains the wherewithal to jump back — the numbers may be sluggish, but there is no need to press the panic button as yet.”

And do you have a company policy regarding social networking? Only 55 percent of the companies do, according to a survey by the International Labor & Employment Group at Proskauer Rose.

The high-powered law firm conducted what it describes as an “informal survey on emerging trends and practices on the use of social media in the workplace,” finding that 76 percent of the 120 responding companies use social media for business purposes.

The results of the 10-question survey are supplemented by brief summaries of rules and regulations around the world, which, as in the U.S., can be fairly loose, or, as in Italy, so restrictive that employers can’t even monitor what their workers are doing on company time using company equipment. (Employers there can, however, prohibit the use of social networking sites during work hours.)

Rather than rely on existing company policies, Proskauer Rose says, “businesses need to have distinct and specific social media policies and practices in order to harness the benefits and minimize the risks these new media present.”

It’s telling that although 55 percent found value in the business use of social media during work hours, but not in its personal use, a significant 31 percent found an advantage in allowing both business and personal use.

The survey also found 31 percent of the companies took disciplinary action against an employee in connection with their use of social networks, while 43 percent have faced an issue with misuse of social networks.

Proskauer suggests companies consider three factors whether they use social networks for recruitment and selection or in disciplinary action:

1. Weigh carefully the value of the information gleaned from social media, since it may be inaccurate, dated, or even the work of someone else;
2. Be mindful of the data privacy requirements of your jurisdiction. Some locales — Hong Kong, for instance — require the filing of a written Personal Information Collection Statement before monitoring can be done;
3. Avoid relying on information that creates a risk of discrimination. “It is possible,” says the firm, “to envisage situations where someone is treated less favorably by reason of a protected characteristic, or a condition is imposed which has disparate impact on people of a particular class.”

U.S. companies should pay particular attention to that latter point. While the U.S. has nothing even remotely approaching the rules in Europe and elsewhere, the National Labor Relations Board is taking a close look at discipline meted out by employers over social media use.

The Workplace Privacy, Data Management & Security Report published by the Jackson Lewis firm, reported NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe E. Solomon telling a labor conference last month that every one of the board’s 52 regional offices has at least one pending case involving social media issues in some fashion.

Two of the most recent complaints against companies for terminating employees over their Facebook postings were filed in May by the Buffalo and Chicago offices.

In Buffalo, five workers at a non-profit were terminated when they posted complaints about working conditions. The Facebook postings amounted to “protected concerted activity,” said the NLRB, “because it involved a conversation among coworkers about their terms and conditions of employment, including their job performance and staffing levels.”

More curious is the Chicago case, which arose when a BMW salesman complained that his dealership served hot dogs and water during a promotional event. That, too, the NLRB considered protected activity, reasoning that the posting reflected the feelings of other sales staff about the impact on their commissions.

In Canada, the British Columbia Labour Relations Board seems more employer generous. Last fall it upheld the firing of two workers who posted highly offensive comments to Facebook during a union certification push.  The board said it didn’t matter that the employees did their posting during their off hours and away from the work site.

As Proskauer attorneys wrote, in commenting on the Canadian case and another involving a fired pub worker in Britain, “it would be prudent for multinational employers to review their policies on the use of social media sites (or to put policies in place if they do not yet have any).”

Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster. –Professor Geert Hofstede, Dutch social psychologist

One of the greatest challenges facing global companies right now is their ability to exploit synergies and efficiencies in their global talent acquisition and retention programs. When considered with the fact we are about to enter an era of unparalleled talent scarcity around the world, the role of the global employer brand manager is set to become one of the most critical roles inside global companies.

Global talent acquisition has become increasingly complex. The need for systems integration, understanding of culture diversity, social and technological changes, jobless, uneven economic recoveries in many countries, the threat of declining fertility rates, inequality in global education standards, and the impact of aging populations in many developed economies has created multiple challenges for global companies which show no signs of easing soon!

Leaders I speak with around the world are saying they are running hard to stand still and where previously they could take 1-2 years to research, develop, and implement talent acquisition and retention strategies, the competitiveness for talent is demanding leaders react quicker and more decisively to stay ahead of the competition.

Even top employer-branding companies like Google, Adidas, and Deloitte are constantly seeking innovative ways to source, develop, and retain talent. If that’s what is happening with the market leaders, consider the millions of other companies around the world who have similar challenges. At a global level the problem is magnified to unthinkable proportions and the solutions are going to need a mix of short- and long-term initiatives including collaboration between companies, industries, universities, and governments. There is no benefit to global corporations if leadership talent is in high supply in Scandinavia when manufacturing operations are in India and there is a dearth of leaders with the right skills.

The Reality of Globalization and its Impact on Employer Branding

The social and culture integration brought about through globalization can foster broader understanding and co-operation between employees around the world, and potentially economies of scale in the allocation of human resources, but is it really that simple?

Following the debilitating global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008, companies based in North America and in Western Europe took the most drastic action, with 69 percent of U.S. companies and 63 percent of UK companies reducing headcount. We trusted our global financial systems would be kept under control by economists and that markets would move freely and trade would become increasingly borderless. The GFC taught us just how vulnerable we are in a globalized, connected world. What often goes unreported is the impact on the poorest countries which were hit hardest, with 90 percent exposed to the impact of the crisis. As a result, 50 million people were sent into extreme poverty and 100 million into chronic hunger.

Since the GFC, there has been an uneven recovery in labor markets, with a continued rise in joblessness in the developed economies and European Union region and a steady to slightly improving unemployment picture in most developing regions. This downward “stickiness” of unemployment — that unemployment rates tend to remain high despite a recovery in economic growth — is also reflected in the country-level data, raising concerns that many countries are experiencing a jobless recovery.

In 2011 the global employment landscape looks a little different to what we learned in textbooks at school! The ability of organizations to attract and retain talent that contributes to growth and profitability is no longer limited to drawing upon the local or national workforce. Companies now have tools at their disposal to tap into the global talent pool and what I call “pockets of talent excellence” — small clusters of highly talented individuals or small groups who are on top of global issues and trends, adaptable and agile enough to move in and out of companies on a project-by-project basis providing expertise to companies at a speed far more superior to hiring of full-time employees.

The Mobile Workforce

Mastering the management of today’s traditional worker is no simple task. As global priorities continue to shift and change, organizations are looking to make strategic financial and human capital decisions. One of the most prevalent changes is an increased use of contingent labor to fill short-term gaps and specific labor segments. This group of workers is growing at more than twice the rate of the full-time workforce, and the trend looks set to continue.

The challenge for organizations is how to strike the right balance between producing the work themselves or outsourcing parts of it to locally or overseas workers. The winners will be those organisations that move early to tap into the global pool of misplaced talent who are ready, willing, and able to do the work others in the local country may be unwilling or incapable of doing.

Citizens in poorer countries with access to the Internet are now homeschooling their children by accessing the vast amount of educational resources available on the Internet. The trend of self education is likely to accelerate as parents are no longer prepared to wait for governments to reinvent their education systems. All that is missing for these parents is an Internet connection. Wikipedia alones contains enough information in the right hands to educate the world’s poorest children with the potential to unlock “pockets of talent excellence.”

Today, foreign-born workers with university degrees or equivalent qualifications make up just 2 percent of the European labor market, compared with 4.5 percent in the United States and nearly 10 percent in Canada. Improved education and training must go hand in hand with increased labour migration. Employability will continue to be a huge problem worldwide. Because of the uneven quality of education systems, only 25 percent of Indian and 20 percent of Russian professionals are currently considered employable by multinationals.

American firms generated $1.68 trillion in profit in the last quarter of 2010 alone and have little incentive to invest it back into R&D in their home country when they could put it in countries such as Brazil, India, or China. These profits won’t stay on balance sheets for long; companies will be merged or acquired likely with the mission to keep labor costs as low as possible in order to maximize shareholder returns. With the richest 2 percent in the world owning more than half of all global assets, this figure may come as no surprise. Welcome to the new normal! There is so much corporations can do to build a pathway to corporate success than traditional ways of value creation.

There are real societal problems waiting for corporations or industries to solve, yet there seems to be a reluctance to engage in issues which seem unsolvable. This is where employer branding without borders can have a significant impact, resolving societal issues using a coordinated approach between corporations, industries, and governments. If the continents of Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America were able to each increase their share of world exports by just 1 percent, 128 million people would be lifted out of poverty, five times what it receives in aid. Or consider that nearly 1 million people are trafficked across borders, most of these for sexual exploitation with around half of them minors. Here lies an opportunity for some of the world’s leading brands to really make their employer brand distinctive.

Skills Mismatch

To “manufacture” talent for the long term, national governments, academia, and industry need to work together to better align education and workforce training with the needs of industry. Companies need to implement a robust workforce strategy that takes into account not only the skills needed to execute business strategy, but external factors that impact talent sources such as demographic shifts, technological revolutions, and the rise of emerging markets.

Demographic Changes

As many world populations age, birth rates in most mature economies are trending downward. Many Western economies cite declining birth rates as a major problem in attracting talent. Yet China, India, Eastern Europe, and parts of South America are also grappling with critical talent shortages. Russia alone faces an estimated reduction of approximately 20 million working-age people by 2030. The UN anticipates that China’s working-age population (those aged 15-59) will fall behind Vietnam’s in 2020 and lag behind India and Brazil in 2025.7 China is already facing skills shortages at the senior management and executive level, and expects workforce growth of less than 5 percent by 2015, at which time one-third of the country’s billion-plus population will be over 50 years old.

In reality, 90 percent of the world’s people will never leave the country where they were born. People get 95 percent of their news from domestic sources, and those sources focus most of their coverage on domestic news. Only 21 percent of U.S. news coverage is international, and, of that, half deals with U.S. foreign affairs. In European countries about 38 percent of news is International, but almost half relates to stories involving other countries in Europe. No wonder a better understanding of culture diversity needs to find its way into your employer brand strategy.

It’s not surprising that we are yet to see many companies achieve success as a Tier 1 global employer branding company (see the graphic). The ability to manage a global employer brand strategy is becoming more complex even though leaders are supported in their efforts by rapidly improving technology that allows them to connect with employees faster and cheaper than ever before. Global companies need to act now to put the systems in place to ensure they can tap into the rising entrepreneurial workforce that will emerge from countries where the Internet has been inaccessible until now. Mobile technology and low-cost laptops, netbooks, and tablets are flooding in these areas. This approach must be part of a coordinated approach with local leaders empowered to unlock this potential.

Social and Technological Changes

Since its birth in 1991 the World Wide Web has transformed our access to information and to each other. The focus for companies over the past 10 years has been how to sell more products using the Internet. Many commentators talked about the end of the face-to-face sale, an attitude that led to the technology bubble that crashed in 2000, sending many investors and companies into bankruptcy when all they had invested in was a domain name and grand idea! The Internet has now penetrated more than 30 percent of the world’s population and is set to continue to accelerate its growth as more citizens in India and China connect to the web using low-cost mobile and PC technology.

What was missing in the early stages of employer brand strategy by early adopters of the concept and still is today in many countries is an understanding and acceptance of culture diversity. Whilst many commentators talk about “one world” or “statelessness” where global corporations can exploit low costs of labor in emerging economies while selling to the masses in their home country, the reality of a global employer brand strategy is still many years away for many global companies.

The Rise of the Global Employer Brand Manager

The number of employer branding positions has been on the rise. There has been more than a 250 percent growth in job vacancies since 2006. This will continue to increase in line with economic growth (albeit at different rates) across the world as employer branding is still closely viewed by many companies as aligned with recruitment practices, though this is changing.

Less than 20 percent of firms around the world have a clear employer brand strategy, and as expected developed markets are leading the way with U.S./Canada rates the highest (19.7 percent), followed by Asia (19.4 percent), Europe/UK (18.4%), Australia (15%), Turkey (12.3%), and Russia (7.6%). Clearly there is still alot of work to do!

With the rise in employer brand dedicated functions appearing in organizational charts, over the coming years there are three key focus areas organisations should focus on to build capabilities of leaders who will be responsible for the global employer brand strategy.

Cultivating the Global Employer Brand Leader

My own perspective on developing the capability of the global employer brand leader is greatly influenced by the places, people, and learnings from my two global tours which has allowed me to experience the cultures of employees from more than 38 cities in 24 countries since 2007.  In many ways we are all very similar (the global citizen!) yet in many ways we are very different (our cultures help shape our values and beliefs which have prepared us to survive in our local regions).

This all supports the need for employer brand leaders with 1) a good understanding of global issues and culture diversity, 2) an ability to localize the global employer brand strategy, and 3) manage the employer brand for the long term.

Understanding Global Issues and Culture Diversity

Leaders need to understand how the world really works (not just from what the media feeds them!) and the impact on employment. Source information on current issues and trends relevant to employer branding which has already been aggregated by thought leaders, experts, and reputable journalists.

Encourage leaders to develop a network of employer brand managers, thoughts leaders, and academics from around the world and follow them on the most popular social media networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You’re likely to gain insights into their thinking well in advance of it appearing in articles like this!

Send managers on international assignments to connect the theory to reality. The Internet can only provide a one-dimensional view of the world. It’s important to experience local culture on the ground. Spending time with managers in their home country will also foster a culture of trust, engagement, and support of global employer branding initiatives.

Conduct training in culture diversity for managers to enhance knowledge, understanding, and empathy in differences in culture and how they impact the employer brand.

Localize the Employer Brand Strategy

Establish a framework for your global employer brand strategy and ensure internal and external stakeholders are on the same page.

In my new book Employer Brand Leadership — A Global Perspective I detail the “Employer Brand Excellence Framework” which defines the employment experience from a stakeholder perspective (see the graphic). The Framework considers the role of stakeholders including employees, prospective candidates, customers, investors, and society in employer branding.

Adapting the global employer brand strategy to local environments should begin with a focus on the employee experience. Not all employees are the same and while companies like to use a “one-size-fits-all” engagement strategy, the reality is that most employees want to have their own needs met before they consider those of their team members or the organization as a whole. The employer brand strategy has to be build from the ground up.

Manage the Employer Brand for the Long Term

If there is one variable that causes more employer brand strategies to fail or to not even get started, it is the lack of relevant measures to determine the return on investment of the employer brand strategy over the long term. Most metrics used are short-term measures such as recruitment advertising costs or job-board spend. Metrics need to be more strategic and should include measures such as quality of hire, retention rate, and employee engagement which will provide deeper insights into the level of value creation from your employer brand strategy.

At the onset of your employer brand strategy, metrics based on desired outcomes should be established.  There is no one-size-fits-all measurement tool for your employer brand program.  The key is developing a set of metrics that is based on your own unique challenges and business objectives. Senior managers should develop a dashboard of metrics that is relevant to their organization’s strategy rather than implementing a “me-too” ROI measurement tool.

The key differentiator of companies that successfully adopt the employer brand concept in the future will be those that appoint dedicated employer brand resources and staffing, develop a clear strategy to work toward, achieving a Tier 1 status, and whose outcomes consider the objectives of candidates, employees, customers, investors, and society.

Some Final Thoughts

While most global brands have evolved to at least a Tier 3 employer brand status, there is so much more potential for these corporations to continuing making profits while contributing to sustainable impacts on communities or contributing to solving some of the global issues which have the potential to change the world as we know it today. This includes issues such as climate change, poverty, child slavery, people-trafficking, and environmental damage. A successful global employer brand strategy which drives value creation will require a collaborative approach between business, industry, and governments and an ability to connect a company’s employees across borders through effective management of cultural diversity.

The appointment of a global employer brand manager may just be the answer to get things moving!

References

• International Labor Office, Global Employment Trends 2011
• An Oracle White Paper, April 2010, “Successfully Executing and Managing a Contingent Workforce Strategy”
• “MEPs Support the European Blue Card Proposal for Highly Skilled Immigrants, November 20, 2008,
• World Economic Forum Global in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group, Talent Risk – Seven Responses
• Hewlett, S., and Rashid, R., “The Battle for Female Talent in Emerging Markets,” Harvard Business Review (May 2010)
• Time magazine, June 20, 2011
• The Journal of International Security Affairs, Fall 2009
• PWC, Talent Mobility 2020 – The Next Generation of International Assignments
• Business Economics, October 2005
• Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Adecco Institute, and University of Warwick

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

The pay’s about the same; the benefits are every bit as good; the job is equally challenging; and, the training and career ladders are equivalent.

So how do you attract the top talent when you don’t have quite the same brand awareness as your closest competitors?

“Flexibility is the number one carrot,” says Paul Peterson, national talent resource manager for the Canadian branch of international accounting firm Grant Thornton.

Grant Thornton is a top 10 accounting firm. In size, it ranks fifth or sixth, depending on who’s counting. Either way, it’s a firm with significant resources, career mobility, a global reach, and, as Peterson observes, a brand not as well known in North America as the Big Four (DeloitteTouche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG.) With salaries and benefits comparable among the firms, his recruiters have to be more innovative in selling Grant Thornton to top candidates.

So what do they do?

“We work hard to identify potential high quality employees in advance. When we approach them we have a stated goal of getting inside someone to find out ‘what makes them tick.’ Once you have a sense of someone’s values you can take a step back and determine ways to structure a job to accommodate them,” says Peterson.

Borrowing from the principles outlined by Daniel Pink in his bestseller, Drive, the Grant Thornton team emphasizes flexibility.

Pink, in his now famously viral 18 minute speech at the TEDGlobal conference last year, says, “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” What most motivates 21st century workers is  “autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things.”

These are the differentiators that Peterson and his team sell to their prospects. “I don’t know that we necessarily talk about it that way, but we try to appeal to those same drivers,” says Peterson.

While money always factors in, it is rarely the primary attractor. “It’s so much more than that …  Sometime we highlight the things that are already in place. Sometimes it’s about the flexibility in work arrangements. That flexibility gives them control, autonomy … ”

Tangible carrots of all sorts — the Yin of management — have long been the tools employers have used to motivate workers to higher levels of productivity. Sticks are the Yang.

An article in the Harvard Business Review detailed the results of a multi-year study of worker activities and motivations. As part of the study, the authors surveyed some 600 managers on what they considered to be important drivers.  “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” ranked as most important in motivating workers. While not unimportant to workers, they told the researchers that progress — what Pink calls “mastery” — was their most important motivator.

The managers, in a dramatic show of disconnect, listed progress dead last.

“A close analysis,” the study authors write, “shows that making progress in one’s work — even incremental progress — is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.”

What should this mean for recruiters?

Writing in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, Joseph Shaheen, managing director of Human Alliance, Inc, said, “The recruiting leader’s responsibility is no longer simply to recruit. It is to manage the livelihood of her entire organization.”

Amplifying his written comments in an interview, Shaheen says recruiters should be talking to hiring managers about their candidate experiences, sharing what they have learned from speaking with them and “get past” the conversation about pay and benefits.

“The way most HR managers are … they are not looking at alternatives,” he says. In fact, “Recruiters are not even expected to discuss these things.”

What kinds of non-monetary incentives might tip the scales for a high potential candidate? Regular access to the CEO or other high-ranking company executive — visibility — might convince a career-focused candidate. Another might value coaching. It’s a bene that is routinely offered to senior executives and almost never to mid-level candidates, Shaheen says.

Still another might be lured by the promise of working on challenging projects. That’s an incentive technology recruiters find works well, says Dice’s Tom Silver. Of the tech recruiters who are finding they have to sweeten offers, seven percent use projects as a primary incentive. More use flexible working arrangements.

At Grant Thornton, Paul Peterson’s recruiters have those conversations with hiring managers and supervisors.

“They have influence (on the corporate culture). Because they are talking to a lot of people, hearing from candidates and digging in to their motivations, trying to get inside them, they have the data,” says Peterson.

Grant Thornton recruiters, he says, have “a lot of input,” encouraging managers to be flexible in how they incent and manage staff. The feeling among recruiters and managers is that it is paying off. The candidates for whom the terms of employment were more flexible — call them the personalized offers — provide more and better referrals than more traditionally hired workers. There’s a sense, too, that they are more productive.

“You have to have a culture internally that accepts it (flexibility and non-traditional arrangements). In the end, it’s a lot more up front work, but it’s much more successful this way.”

NOTE: This article was excerpted from a longer piece originally published in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

That’s the message from two experienced global recruiters today at the ERE Expo in Florida: Raghav Singh, a familiar ERE author who has helped staff organizations in Switzerland, Japan, China, India, and elsewhere, and Kim Rutledge, a Dell recruiting leader turned consultant who has managed Latin American recruiting.

Singh notes the following from a recent Towers-Watson Survey:

• In the U.S. and the UK, a competitive salary is the most sought-after quality in a job.
• Germans list “challenging work” as most important to them in a job.
• Career advancement is the top goal of job-seekers in Brazil, India, and China.
• A convenient work location is a big lure in Germany and the UK; less so in the U.S. and UK.

Rutledge has strong relationships in Brazil. She notes that the types of email blasts that work in the U.S. probably won’t work there, as the country is more relationship-oriented, and referrals are even more effective than they are in the U.S. “It’s a very face-to-face culture,” she says. LinkedIn is nice, but for Brazilians the online relationships generally won’t last as long as the U.S. before it’s best to move it to a more personal conversation.

Rutledge says English-speaking skills are weaker in Brazil than in many other South American countries, and it’s best to use Portuguese-speaking recruiters. Hierarchies are important in Brazil. “It’s very much top-down,” Rutledge says. “They go up their chain for what are sometimes paternalistic concerns, in my very North American mind.”

In Brazil, relocating people isn’t as easy as Americans might think it is. What seems like a simple move from one city to another may be thought of by an employee as a Manhattan-to-Oklahoma sort of move from one subculture to another.

She also talked about Panama. Labor costs there are very low; it reminds her of India, where the educational system and government infrastructure could be better, but the country is very attractive to Nike, HP, Dell, some banks, and other companies with call centers and other operations. Rutledge says the Panamian market favors very “old-school” recruiting. Online recruiting lags behind Brazil and the U.S. The postal system is weak; in fact, some people don’t even get regular mail the way Americans know it, if they don’t pay for it.

“The appetite for career growth in Panama is unbelievable,” she says. Companies are more interested in a company than expertise in a field; someone might move from human resources to a very different department rather than move from one HR job to another.

In Mexico, Rutledge has found that security concerns make it more difficult to find information about people. Also, Mexico City has a formal culture where people are often much more dressed up than an American tourist might think if their view of Mexico is what they’ve seen are the flip-flops found in a beach town. She had to watch how she communicated when in Mexico City because the more formal relationships, where trust builds a little more slowly than perhaps in the U.S., took more nurturing.

Mexico’s a country where a mobile recruiting campaign can work. The challenge is finding the right names of people to contact; for that she says you’ll want to rely more on local databases than on big global sources such as Monster.

“Brands rule” in India, Singh says. It’s a lot harder to get quality people if you’re not a big-company, whether a big Western name or a big Indian multinational like Infosys. If you lack a big brand, he says, “you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back.” As Singh has said before, there’s a myth that India offers a bottomless pit of talent. In reality, there aren’t as many great colleges as there are in the U.S., and someone who calls themselves an “engineer” may be defining the word in a wide variety of ways.

The difference in income between companies is huge in India, he adds, with big, well-known and well-respected companies offering a big premium.

Resume fraud is “rampant” in India, he adds. Of course, resumes are notorious for exaggerations, but “not to the extent” you’ll find in India, he says. Some top schools even embed a chip in their diplomas to prove they’re the real thing.

Chinese-language skills are a must for recruiting in China, he says. Even people who speak English often have a weaker command of the language than businesspeople in many other countries. Also, you need to be “extremely explicit” to candidates in China about what to expect on the job.

Job descriptions shouldn’t leave out something an employee will end up doing, as they’ll end up quite surprised their expectations weren’t met. Singh said sales job descriptions can be challenging; engineering descriptions less so.

IBM issued its biennial Chief Human Resource Officer Study last week. Its 70 pages detail the workforce challenges these leaders see ahead.

In the introduction, IBM’s senior VP for HR, J. Randall MacDonald, says, “HR leaders expect their businesses to remain focused on two equally important goals during the next three years — the need to drive growth yet, at the same time, maintain operational efficiency.”

The study is part survey, and part focus group. IBM’s researchers surveyed 707 HR leaders of companies of all sizes around the world; 600 of them were interviewed face-to-face.

Their immediate focus, as you might expect, is on present conditions. Wresting the maximum efficiency out of the operation is the overriding business challenge for 64 percent of the global HR leaders. But looking ahead three years, they expect — in almost equal measure — that their companies’ top issues will be the introduction of new products and services, expansion, and improving efficiency.

Much of that growth will be in India and China, as global businesses from mature countries like the U.S. and European nations broaden their market. Surprisingly, companies in China and India and other developing nations will look to expansion in the mature markets. The IBM report says:

“34 percent of CHROs in growth markets say they anticipate increasing headcount in North America over the next three years, while 37 percent plan additional investment in Western Europe. This includes companies from India, where 45 percent of respondents indicated they plan to increase headcount in North America and 44 percent in Western Europe. In China, 33 percent of CHROs we interviewed said they plan to increase headcount in North America and 14 percent in Western Europe.”

Obviously, these companies will be competing for talent at just the time most economists expect American companies to also be expanding and adding employees. Though confidence in a hiring uptick is at a nadir, as evidenced by the seesawing Consumer Confidence Index of The Conference Board, the economic signs all point to a stabilizing of the U.S. economy.

The rate of layoffs has dropped substantially since the beginning of the year. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “The 12-month moving average (of announced layoffs) has now dropped to 46,866, the lowest since November 2000, when it stood at 43,744.”

Private sector job growth has been positive, if small, for several months now. That’s a huge change from 2009 when job losses, private industry job losses, were half a million a month.

None of that is to minimize the pain of the millions who are out of work or working part-time or working at jobs beneath their capability because they can’t find other work. Just last week, the number of first-time unemployment claims rose again, a sign that economic improvement is still very much touch and go.

Those who still have jobs may feel lucky, but they are also stressed. An Adecco survey found that 63 per cent of bosses say they are more stressed today than before the recession started. That may help explain why only 30 percent of the workers in the survey aspire to management.

Worker stress, fueled by the pressure to do more — or at least as much — with less, is not just a U.S. problem. A Kenexa Research Institute WorkTrends Report ($499) says only 53 percent of employees worldwide believe their company has enough people to get the job done. Some workers would probably say there aren’t enough no matter what. However, as the steady increase in temporary staffing suggests, employers are themselves seeing the need for more help — but not permanent help. Not just yet.

There’s evidence, in fact, that hiring in the near term is not going to grow much. Although productivity declined in the second quarter of the year (third quarter data is not yet out), the San Francisco Federal Reserve says productivity would need to slow to about 1 percent or less for there to be strong employment growth. That is unlikely, based on history, says the report’s author, senior economist Daniel Wilson.

In fact, all through the recession American businesses have wrested more productivity from their workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that business output per hour, a key measure of productivity, is up. In 2009, in the depths of the depression, business output rose 3.5 percent, a greater percentage than in any year since 2003.

The Kenexa research suggests the recession has made companies more open to creativity; 52 percent of the respondents report working in an innovative climate. While India and China lead in workers reporting an innovative climate, the U.S. is 6th, well ahead of countries like Japan and Germany. It also ranks 6th in the world for employee engagement.

Kenexa’s research focused on leadership issues and how it correlates to worker engagement, effectiveness, and corporate success. On effectiveness, the managers of the world scored a cumulative index of 55 percent. On this measure, U.S. managers were somewhat above the global average, but several points behind leaders India and China. Among the 10 drivers of leadership effectiveness Kenexa measured, the U.S. was a standout in only one: motivating employees to work hard.

That is certainly borne out by the BLS productivity measures.

Third quarter productivity data won’t be released until next month. When the numbers are released, they may help make clearer the future job picture. Even if the data shows productivity growth standing still, surveys by SHRM and CareerBuilder and others say it will take a while for corporate executives to be convinced to start hiring in numbers enough to reduce the unemployment rate.

SHRM’s LINE report for October opens this way: “The pace of job growth is so slow that hardly anyone is noticing it.” While it predicts little change in hiring this month, the report does say that recruiters are experiencing more difficulty in hiring talent.

“At least for higher-level, higher-skilled job seekers, things look to be improving,” said Jennifer Schramm, SHRM manager of workplace trends and forecasting. “HR professionals reported that recruiting these kinds of workers in September 2010 was more difficult than at the same time (in 2009).”

Looking ahead, a CareerBuilder survey says 21 percent of the surveyed employers expect to add full-time, permanent workers this quarter. There’s still plenty of caution. The survey says 27 percent of employers predict they will hire contract or temporary workers. A quarter of the hiring managers expect to transition at least some of the contingent staff to permanent positions.

This brings us back to the IBM report. The report notes in its introduction that the “worldwide focus on growth will require companies to fundamentally rethink how they manage the workforce and overcome borders.”

The IBM researchers found three areas of greatest challenge for companies: leadership, workforce management, and collaboration. As the report puts it, “Based on insights from more than 700 senior HR leaders, we believe three essential capabilities will enable organizations to move beyond the remaining borders that constrain workforce effectiveness: cultivating creative leaders, mobilizing for speed and flexibility, and capitalizing on collective intelligence.”

While most of the U.S., for that matter, much of the world, sees job creation as the most important economic issue of the day, the world’s HR leaders see managing future growth and workforce management as the most important issues of tomorrow. Both the IBM and Kenexa reports intersect at the issue of leadership. Both reports offer a snapshot of what is and what needs to be done.

And in this future vision, both reports lend crucial weight to the importance of talent acquisition and the training and development of tomorrow’s corporate leaders.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

Today he’s my best friend; we consult with each other on every new direction or thought, from big to small. We support each other on a daily basis.

I thought of him this morning, about our relationship, and the fact that in the distant past I was so confident that I’ll never want to help him, thinking that I hated him — for me was at the time, a “hard fact.” Something no one could argue with.

This morning, thinking of him and how things have changed during the past approximately 20 years, connected me to my conversations with many recruiters in Israel about their relationship with their corporate partners — usually from the U.S.

“They Would Never Agree to this”

I’ve been training thousands of HR recruiters and managers during the past four years regarding online recruiting. When I ask local recruiters about their progress in implementing social media tools and online recruiting in their company, I usually hear the same sentence: “We’re in a unique position, representing a U.S. corporation in Israel, and they would never agree to that…”

“They” is the U.S. based corporation. ”That” is usually one of a few things that “they” usually don’t agree to:

• Enabling the local international site to open a local website, in the local language, even in a different “look and feel,” adapted to local expectations and habits.
• Enter the social media independently, not only under the “umbrella” of the U.S. corporation.
• Give publications, articles, and blogs a independent online presence, focused on the potential local candidates.
• Have U.S. corporate people train local international professional recruiters on using the different tools.

What’s the Impact?

I’ll share with you the latest in Israel, following our HRD March 2010 sourcing survey of corporate recruiting departments, and some of the results that I see following the fact that companies representing U.S. corporations are not receiving support:

• Higher cost of hire. Placement agencies and job boards are one of the three top sources of hire.
• Lack of use of online tools. Only 5% of the organizations use their corporate website as a main source of hire; only 45% use online social media tools for recruiting.

How can you improve your work with international sites?

My top five recommendations for U.S. corporations on how to support their International sites are:

• Teach new technology as soon as you learn it
• Allow them to act local
• Trust the local sites; delegate
• Learn from them (maybe they’ll bring new ideas that you can use)
• Benchmark for a worldwide set of best-known-methods, and share them

The value that these changes will bring your company:

• Save money and shorten time to hire in the company
• Build a stronger worldwide brand
• Align corporate recruiting processes
• Enable diversity and new ideas generated by worldwide sites
• Let worldwide sites feel more connected to the corporate

What needs to change? You can help!

The reason why I thought about my brother and me in relation to this conversation is the way we saw it at the time as the “hard fact.” Something that we just couldn’t imagine that would change in our lifetime.

For a few years now I’ve been telling recruiters in Israel that all they need to do is start the dialogue with their corporate partners, and maybe things will change in the future. This year I decided to try and make a bigger difference, and I’ll be presenting my thoughts on this delicate partnership between U.S. corporations and local international sites at the coming ERE Expo.

As part of my preparations for it I need your help:

I’ve prepared a very short survey that will take not more than five minutes of your time to answer. It is intended for HR and recruiting teams of both U.S. corporates and their local international sites. Please help me with filling it out and forwarding the link to your partners around the world in the different local sites.

I’ll be more than happy to share with anyone who fills the survey its results.

To answer the survey please click here.

Long-term reliance has a slow, grinding positive feedback loop that in time can become a dependency, and actually preclude the vision necessary to see other alternatives.

We know that the momentum of high-speed travel makes it hard to change direction, or even to see clearly where you are going. In the same fashion China’s high-growth economic trajectory, and low-cost labor model, may fit the bill for a blind-spot when it comes to the future. This is not the least of China’s many Black Swans, but it is a big game-changer.

The source of the reliance is the well over 100 million people who make up China’s production line workforce. Clearly, it is impossible for anyone to summarize the lives of these hard-working people, but the commonalities are there, and could be worth exploring.

Let’s call our representative Ms. Qiu. She is a 39-year old woman from the Sichuan province who, at the age of 19, was more than happy to leave her village and move up to the “Big Smoke.” She dreamed that she would make money, find a husband, learn some useful skills, and live a bigger life. At the very least the city would offer her something to do, which was not true, and is not true, of her home town.

Ms. Qiu was not a spoiled, fickle individual, and she could endure privations that many of us would consider very harsh. Like most women in this scenario she succeeded in her own terms and, after 20 years, she is married with a child.

Her daughter, Bing Bing, lives in Sichuan with her grandmother and grandfather, and goes to school every day with the expectation of six people on her shoulders (4-2-1). Bing Bing is very likely to succeed academically and will not want to work in a factory. Mom and Dad are doing everything they can to make sure her life is even bigger than theirs.

For Bing Bing’s mother and father, it has been 20 years of hard work in the textile and electronics industry. Mom got to be a Production Cell Leader, and Dad got to learn about plastic injection component tooling, and has been re-classified as a skilled worker.

It is true that the brilliance of their dreams waned as they grew older, and eventually melded, not clashed, with reality of their lives. This has been easy enough to accept because, apart from a few setbacks, things have improved steadily. Ms. Qiu, or Mrs. Li as she is now called, did find her beau in the city, and she did have a child, one that is actually going to complete high school.

This was a first for her family, and it makes her proud.

Mr. Li was lucky to get into a company-sponsored training program and is set to become a qualified tool maker. His family sees him as a very solid, reliable provider, and in the future he will be in the position to offer an employer a skill-set, rather than accept whatever manual work he can get. The biggest issue for him is that he can make his own future, something that his own father could not even have dreamed about doing.

Mr. and Mrs. Li are not big on strikes and they don’t want to rock the boat. They understand the higher expectations of the younger generation from an intellectual point of view, but not emotionally. They don’t feel it. These kids coming up seem too assertive and a little too spoiled for their own good, but at the same time they are not sufficiently arrogant to imagine that everything they went through should be repeated in an indefinite loop. Mr. Li has made a decision to try to ease tensions but it’s hard to hold back motivated young people when they have made a decision to do something.

Fly in the Ointment

But just when you thought things had come to a hard-fought, manageable stasis, with a predictable increase in salaries, and a definite increase in conflict in the workplace, the flow of nice, hard-working Sichuan youth is grinding to a halt. That decline itself is accelerating and the resulting change will be fast, demographically speaking.

The next generation of Ms. Qiu’s and young Master Li’s are not entering the workforce as expected because they were simply never born. For the few who are coming onstream, many will not follow the same path as their parents, as amply illustrated by the Li’s success in getting Bing Bing through school.

Unskilled workers are effectively vanishing from the workforce. The new generation is slowly switching to the professional workforce but many are falling into a black hole when they graduate because the economy cannot use their skills yet (hyperbole alert).

The lack of a transition generation, through qualified skilled labor, is the problem that has yet to be seriously addressed. This is still a big surprise to me. China’s government may come across as technocratic but the Chinese culture is Confucian, and the emphasis there is on everyone becoming a “scholar.” This has contributed to an economic model that will be hard to transition.

Not impossible, just hard.

(Tip ‘O the Hat to Going Native)

To begin, some basic, fundamental relationship-building is key. To this end, traveling to the region and having some personal face time is important. Demonstrating your desire to listen to colleagues in the region and understand their business and talent needs in person is critical. It shouldn’t be done via the phone or email. Considering each country in Europe on its own terms (and recruiting locally) is not only an important mindset and approach; it extends to systems and processes. Don’t assume that systems and processes designed for one particular region will work in Europe (or even ones designed for one country in Europe will automatically work for another in the area). Be prepared to adapt them, at least to a degree, to allow for local differences.

Application processes generally be kept simple, with as few clicks as possible. Candidates are used to using simple and well-designed websites for e-commerce purposes. They will not have the patience to follow a clunky web-based job application process. Thus websites are key. A company has to have a high-quality careers section of their corporate site — or even a microsite. Applicants — whether direct or via other sources — will review the careers pages and recruiters can save a lot of valuable interview time if many of the typical FAQs have already been answered via the careers pages. Job boards will inevitably evolve fast in the coming years. Many candidates now skip job boards initially and go straight to search engines like Google to search for their desired role. Search engine optimization is therefore increasingly important.

However, with improved technology and access has also come challenges. Undoubtedly the web has made the process of finding candidates far easier, where the required skills are scarce and work permits are available; the challenge, however, is companies can now expect to receive job applications from literally all around the world, and there is the real risk that potentially hundreds of people may apply for certain roles where either the employer does not need to bring in talent from abroad or where the odds of receiving a work permit are minimal.

Social media is also a vital and emerging tool these days (although outside the U.S. there is little evidence as of yet that it has been used very successfully for direct sourcing). LinkedIn is now very powerful, as is Xing in German-speaking countries or areas (of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) and Viadeo in France. Many companies are still not making the right use of social media and many fail to appreciate how effective a candidate’s personal marketing page can be on the web.

The following are some additional recommendations for improving talent acquisition activities in Europe (that can also be applied to an organization’s recruiting activities overall):

• Tailor to each culture/country — as has been mentioned, recruiting cultures and what’s accepted as recruiting norms vary from country-to-country and region-to-region. There is no “one size fits all.” Thus understand what makes the recruiting culture unique in each country or region that you work and customize your approach to address those needs.
• Tailor to each candidate pool — because various countries use the web and technology in different ways, tailoring your specific message to candidate pools helps get the word to them, irrespective of whether or not they have access to the web. Since not all countries use the web as much as other parts of the world for recruiting, this will enable you to achieve a greater consistency in your recruiting.
• Tailor your technology to each culture/country — remember each country or region may have its own unique tools to identify where the candidates you seek are lurking. Know some of the specific gathering places. Some include typical social networking and media networks … but others include other unique applications, such as Xing for example, which is much more widely used in German-speaking countries than LinkedIn for professional social networking.

There are tried-and-true tips that apply to all organizations around the world, but especially in Europe:

• Train your hiring managers. Management development has not gotten a lot of attention in many businesses in the past 10-plus years, and even some of the best managers need training in effective recruitment. Some hiring managers need significant coaching and guidance that to get the right end result they need to give the right brief to recruiters. It may seem obvious to you. It’s not to others. This is especially key in European environments.
• Employee referrals have taken something of a back seat in the past two years due to the economic downturn, but their time will return. Continue to actively promote them and ensure that they have a positive image and reputation that is marketed well internationally and companywide. They are a relatively rare example of a sourcing methodology that typically works well across the whole of Europe.
• Job descriptions have changed significantly in recent years. Good ones now are far more useful, and good ones really do describe the job — not simply follow a formularized template that hiring managers see as needed to “keep HR happy.” The right key words and searchable terms are vital to attract the type of people with the required skills and experience. Ask the people doing the role well currently how would they describe the job.

Though recruiting in Europe has changed significantly over the past several years, there are still complexities that are unique to its composition of so many different countries residing in such a small space. Many of those challenges and cross-border barriers will remain until other changes (political and otherwise) occur. In the past, recruitment in many countries and companies in Europe may have appeared to outsiders to be less advanced than other regions of the world. Things are changing fast! As technology continues to evolve and become ubiquitous; as multinationals continue to grow and seek efficiencies and cost decreases; and as neighboring countries in Europe continue to lower the barriers to working together, the whole of Europe, including its many individual countries and companies, will indeed be on the cutting edge of the recruiting universe.

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Becoming a leading-edge recruiter is an admirable goal few corporate recruiters strive to achieve. Not only must a leading-edge recruiter routinely demonstrate a marked increase in positive business impact over other recruiters, but they must consistently monitor trends, devise new approaches, benchmark against emerging practices, and constantly fight with colleagues often resistant to trying something new.

Historically, staying on top of trends and new approaches was relatively easy, as there were only a few companies isolated in a few narrow geographies that one needed to watch. The War for Talent in 1997 certainly drew a lot of attention to the practices of technology firms in “silicon hubs” like California’s Silicon Valley (home to Google, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook, Twitter, and HP) or Seattle, Washington’s, Silicon Forest (home to Microsoft and Amazon), but up until a few years ago there was no formal process to identify where leading-edge practices were emerging and who was developing them.

ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards and articles by global strategy advisors like Kevin Wheeler and ourselves, who have advised and studied the practices of companies in more than 40 nations, are helping leading-edge recruiters focus their attention where evolution is occurring.

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

No one can argue that rapid growth of the technology sector in 1997 left many technology companies desperate for talent, and that desperation drove many charged with recruiting for such organizations to both collaborate and innovate new practices to help close gaps in supply and demand. While not cheap, importing labor and shifting work to geographies where the supply of labor exceeded the demand has been the dominant approach.

For more than a decade such solutions have helped allocate work across an emerging global talent market, but now many of the geographies that picked up work are also struggling to source qualified talent to staff available projects. While China and India may have a surplus of unemployed/underemployed people, they too have a shortage of skilled professional labor.

As global economic growth focuses on Asia, desperation of firms in Asia to keep pace with the demand for talent is driving more and more talent management focus on excellence in execution, collaboration, evolution, and innovation.

With smaller company sizes, nations like Australia and New Zealand are earning a reputation as being home to progressive companies willing to try new practices. Nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, to name only a few, are channeling state investment dollars into industry-sector-focused universities and research parks that elevate public/private collaboration to new levels.

However, nowhere can one find as much focus on recruiting leadership than in India and China. Twelve years ago production standards in both nations were subpar, work ethics were questionable, and infrastructure was lacking, but today both nations have firms that excel in world-class engineering design, international trade, offshoring, and manufacturing. Over the course of those 12 years, firms in India and China have not only studied and adopted Western talent management practices, they have improved upon them if not in design, most certainly in execution.

Examples of Progressive Recruiting and Talent Management Practices

While ERE readers will need to wait until March to learn about which companies won a recruiting excellence award (with finalists announced soon), what follows are a few practices becoming common among leading employers in India based on our work and a review of the ERE Award Applications. Mentally compare this list of practices to those that are currently in operation at your organization.

General Recruiting Practices

• Prioritization of key jobs and skills. Recruiting resources focuses on the most critical 40%.
• Pre-need hiring. Talent pools mapped and individuals assessed prior to requisition opening.
• Tight integration with sales/operations to drive workforce planning. Recruiting leaders often sit side by side with sales and operations leaders during development meetings to coordinate workforce planning efforts.

Employee Referral Program Practices

• Dedicated referral teams employing a proactive referral strategy in which recruiters personally solicit the names of the very best from the very best employees and managers. (In one organization this approach produced 47% of all hires, garnered a 66% employee participation rate, and consistently produced the highest quality hires, all with a cost-per-hire 20% lower than other hiring channels.)
• Employee referral processes that target corporate alumni in order to boomerang them back. (This approach often produces better results than any other alumni recruitment effort.)
• Onsite referral fairs that allow referred candidates to receive on-the-spot interviews and/or offers.
• Online referral status tracking that provides feedback on status and alerts when a referral’s status changes.
• Established referral targets for individual managers and teams.
• Required pre-assessment of referrals by referring employee. To eliminate poor quality referrals many programs require that employees pre-assess their referral and share the assessment as part of the submission process.
• Service-level agreements that guarantee feedback to the referring employee within 72 hours of submission and help-desk response to inquiries within eight hours.

Metrics and Business-case-related Practices

• Advanced statistical analysis processes including six sigma assessment, value chain analysis, and force field analysis for assessing and improving recruiting process performance.
• Quantification of the direct-dollar impact of new hiring processes on corporate revenues. (In one example, the organization identified that reducing time-to-fill in revenue-generating positions by 40% could increase revenue by millions of dollars.)
• Development of “hiring accuracy” metrics that assesses and quantify hiring success/failure rates.
• Distributed real-time recruiter productivity measures. (One organization found that simply measuring and reporting productivity increased it 70% in one year.)

Recruitment Marketing and Branding Related Practices

• Development of in-house recruitment marketing teams capable of supporting frequent communication design/delivery channel changes.
• Using search engine optimization techniques to measurably increase visibility of jobs and brand messaging online.

College-recruiting-related Practices

• Using ambassador programs to build relationships with top students and faculty.
• Adoption of CRM approaches that let recruiters communicate frequently with students via text messages about events in the students’ lives, such as “best of luck” messages during final exams.
• Development of robust campus performance assessment processes and metrics.
• Use of contests, quizzes, and projects to excite top students and more accurately assess them.
• Engagement of market intelligence data to identify employee value propositions that better engage students.
• Online professional training courses covering topics that improve the quality of potential candidates and attract top students to participate in the application process.
• Leverage alumni to give tech talks, classroom lectures, and on-campus workshops.
• Curriculum guidance. Many organizations work closely with academic leaders and key faculty to align curriculum with industrial need, ensuring that courses focus on practical knowledge and skill development that is immediately relevant.

Training and Development Practices

• Extensive focus on deep enterprise training, development, and leadership preparation. (One organization has built the world’s largest leadership and development training center, exceeding in size GE’s famous Crotonville facility. The 270-acre, $60-million plush facility has a hotel, food center, employee care center, theater, and research facility.)
• Overseas residential training programs. Recent grads are frequently provided an opportunity to work internationally for a period of several months prior to accepting a stationary role in their home country.

Are You Leading or Lagging?

I hope you agree that this list represents some pretty progressive practices and strategies. While India’s leadership position is certainly open to debate, there can be no doubt that staffing challenges in India and China are forcing leading firms like Infosys, Tata, Aricent, Reliance, and Wipro to focus on execution and innovation. Some might argue that lack of government regulation and lower cost of labor enable them to do things you couldn’t do in the U.S. or Western Europe, to which my response is simple: it’s not the job of a leader to whine about what they can’t do, but rather to find a way to do what they need to do.

Not all organizations in India are on the leading edge when it comes to talent management and even those that are have areas that need improvement. The point is that if you want to be on the leading edge you need to be aware of other organizations on the edge, and that moving forward more and more of the firms you need to monitor will be in India, China, and other Asian nations.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking recruiting is a conservative profession. If you’re a “defensive type,” super patriot, or resist being data-driven, you will likely dismiss our contention that the U.S. is/has slipped into second place with regard to recruiting leadership. If, however, you are open-minded, I suggest that you revisit this list of practices and use it to help determine where your firm needs to be if it’s going to seriously compete for talent in the emerging global labor market. Companies in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and China have already started recruiting top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and finance professionals from leading corporations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The battle is heating up. Are you more prepared to fight or give up?

There’s the report from Monster this week that says vast numbers of workers are ready to switch careers for a new job. Another survey, this one from SearchPath International and Antal International, give us a global view of hiring — and firing — trends.

The Global Snapshot offers clues to where the hottest markets in the world are for managers and professionals. (Hint: Think Russia, China, India, Egypt, and Eastern Europe.)

That report dovetails with last week’s USA Today report about an emerging brain drain of managers and professionals from the U.S. to China and India.

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke University and a senior research associate at Harvard University, surveyed some 1,200 immigrants who returned to their native country. He reports that improved opportunities at home, coupled with U.S. visa policies, makes it likely that up to 200,000 white collar migrants will return to China and India in the next five years.

A UPI version of the story includes this comment from Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington: “China needs a lot of well-trained personnel.”

No surprise there, especially no surprise after you peek at The Global Snapshot report that says 74 percent of the surveyed companies in China report they are hiring skilled managers and other white collar professionals now. Also not surprisingly, the report commentary notes that there has been a better than 10 percent rise in the companies shedding workers, which the report notes, suggests “that employers are taking advantage of current conditions to ‘weed out’ less productive members of staff.”

Other hot Asian markets for these same workers: Singapore, Pakistan and Hong Kong. India is bit less robust with 51 percent of the surveyed companies hiring now. But give it a quarter and 66 percent say they’ll be looking for managers and professionals.

In the U.S., 55 percent of respondents report hiring, with the same percentage planning to hire next quarter.

The recession has also got workers thinking that it may be wise to find a new career.

Monster released a poll of workers in North America and Europe showing 89 percent of them would consider or would make a career change if it meant finding a new job. While only 11 percent of the 22,444 visitors to Monster’s sites in Europe, Canada, or the U.S. said they wouldn’t change careers — at least not now — 49 percent said they’ve been wanting to change careers and are ready now.

In Spain, 92 percent of the visitors to the Monster site who took the poll said they were ready to make a career change. They’re feeling the pressure; 44 percent said they feel they must take the first job that comes along. That percentage contrasts sharply with respondents elsewhere, only 23 percent of whom felt they needed to pretty much take anything.

No doubt those who visit Monster sites are motivated job seekers, and probably more willing to switch industries than those who aren’t looking. But when half of those taking the poll answer the question, “Would you consider a job in another industry?” with a “Yes, I’ve been wanting to make a career change,” you can figure that change is underway.

You follow all the rules, keep great records, and even passed an informal EEOC inquiry a couple years ago.

But lurking in your ATS is proof you’re breaking the laws of Germany, or maybe France, or possibly Canada. Maybe all of them. You never wanted those resumes (CVs, if you prefer), wouldn’t sponsor the candidates, and had no interest in hiring anyone from outside the region, let alone the United States. But now that you have applicants from countries with tough privacy laws, you are bound to follow them.

Dr. Donald Harris

“Some companies assume that because they do not have a physical operating presence in Europe or Canada that such privacy laws do not apply to them,” says HR privacy expert Dr. Donald Harris. “This is an erroneous and risky assumption.”

President and founder of HR Privacy Solutions, Harris advises companies on complying with U.S. and international laws regarding the collection and use of employee information.

Even a company with no physical presence in a foreign country may be bound by its laws, he says, should it recruit there. As you can see from the hospital example, recruiting doesn’t have to be active in order for the rules to apply. Receiving a single resume from a foreign national is enough to trigger the application of the privacy rules of the job seeker’s country.

“We are living in a global world, so things are changing, ” Harris says, explaining that the privacy rules of the European Union and its member countries are designed to protect their citizens’ personal information. “The Europeans don’t want to see their laws ignored.”

What keeps our HR hospital executive out of the hot water is that no country is actively pursuing such minor violations as storing CVs beyond the legal limit, or not providing the individual the right to delete their resumes at will. “Enforcement is very difficult for them,” Harris conceeded. The U.S. has no treaties or reciprocal agreements with other countries on these issues, so the impact of foreign rules is muted.

But, warns Harris, “While regulators may have considerable difficulty in enforcing the laws with a foreign company, the laws do apply and international cooperation amongst privacy regulators is increasing. After all, what self-respecting government would allow the Internet to provide a free pass for circumventing its laws relating to privacy, employment, or a host of other areas?”

While the hospital in our example may never open a clinic in a foreign country, or otherwise do business there, a manufacturer might. So might other companies.

“One really has to look at where a company is going” before it decides to ignore foreign rules, Harris observes. If in the future it does decide to go global, its past transgressions could exact a cost.

“And even apart from the legal issues,” says Harris, is showing ignorance or disregard of local laws and expectations about personal information a smart way to go about recruiting someone?”

So what could our fictional hospital do to avoid breaking foreign privacy rules? Here are some simple steps:

• Use pre-application questions that includes a geographic qualifier;
• Discard applications from foreign countries upon receipt;
• Make sure your site has a privacy statement that says what you will be doing with the collected information. Harris recommends that countries that are doing business globally take a look at Boeing’s privacy statement for guidance;
• Review what the European Union says about HR data collection.

In the October issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership we discuss this and other international privacy concerns with Harris and offer his insights on the trends in HR privacy. The Journal is available by subscription only.

First, the headlines:

• A publicist for business law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reminds us that Sept. 8th is the deadline for federal contractors to sign up and use E-Verify, if they want to continue being federal contractors;
• CareerBuilder lit a match to BrightFuse, the business community site it launched 18 months ago, issuing a press release officially announcing it. At the same time, CareerBuilder released a survey saying 45 percent of employers have used social networking sites to research job candidates.
• Australia’s leading high-salary job board — www.sixfigures.com.au — introduces a new look and expanded career content today for its dues paying, high earning members. It’s also putting more news and content on the outside of the login wall.

E-Verify

This is the electronic employment verification program the U.S. Department of Homeland Security operates. If you haven’t used it, chances are you eventually will, since the government is slowly expanding its mandatory use and has made its voluntary use very attractive to employers.

The program is free and (mostly) insulates employers from legal sanctions for hiring undocumented workers if they have verified I-9 information through E-Verify.

Come Sept. 8th, federal contractors will be required to use E-Verify if their contracts exceed $100,000. Their subs, if they earn more than $3,000, will also have to use E-Verify. President George Bush first ordered the program in 2008, but between presidential extensions and a lawsuit, the implementation deadline kept getting pushed until Sept. 8th, a date expected to actually stick this time.

BrightFuse

This is CareerBuilder’s version of Facebook for business. Instead of content a job seeker may come to regret, BrightFuse offers a place for your face in a pantsuit. It’s a professional profile that can be used in place of a standard resume. Recruiters will like it since the data is neatly structured, making it conveniently available for digital capture.

It clearly shows a LinkedIn influence, what with the section for contacts and another for recommendations and the ability to create and join interest groups. It also has taken some cues from Facebook, allowing user to add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to blogs. There’s also a tab for a portfolio to showcase work and a way to export elements of a BrightFuse profile to Facebook. Though with the CareerBuilder survey showing just how fast employers have embraced online backgrounding for candidates, some job seekers may want to keep their BrightFuse profile separate.

SixFigures

I can’t tell you much about this relaunch, except to report what was in the press release I got the other day. Here’s what it says about the site that may already be live when you read this:

“Due to growing demand by high salary earners for more specific career and industry related content, Six Figures is meeting demand by catering for additional aspects of a professional’s career, with career development, directorships, education and industry news forming a part of its extended offering. “

According to the PR, SixFigures has about 25,000 members, a seemingly small number until you consider that the entire labor force in Australia is only 11.2 million. How many of them pay the AU$66 a year wasn’t disclosed.

Incidentally, since the press release came from Australia, which is on the other side of the International Date Line, it wasn’t clear until today whether the new site’s launch date was Aug. 21 in Australia or in the U.S. It’s today, using the North and South American time zones.

The money comes from IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital who, together with investments from News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, Garage Technology Ventures, and individual investors, brings to $22.3 million the capital Simply Hired has raised.

Today’s announcement also made a point of saying the jobs site is cash flow positive and has been for a year. The privately held company also announced that it has seen its revenue grow for each of the last 16 quarters.

Its East Coast rival, Indeed.com, is also profitable, and both job sites now rank among the top-10 most trafficked job sites in the U.S. That’s no mean feat considering neither existed five years ago. Even accepting that it’s a lot easier for Simply Hired to achieve a 209 percent traffic jump, as it did in 2008, than it is for CareerBuilder, Monster, or HotJobs to do the same because of their much higher starting point, the year-in and year-out growth for Indeed and Simply Hired has been nothing short of remarkable.

Nielsen says Simply Hired had 3.8 million unique visitors in January, while Indeed had 5.8 million. A year before, they had 1.2 and 3.3 million respectively. comScore’s numbers, for the June to June period, tell a similar, if somewhat less robust, story of annual growth.

Nor is this a matter of simply buying traffic. Neither site had the investment dollars to match what CareerBuilder did in 2003 when it outbid Monster and signed traffic deals with AOL and MSN that were worth up to $265 million. Instead, both Simply Hired and Indeed have put together networks of redistribution partners who carry some or all of the job listings the two sites cull from the Internet. In fact, it is because of the listings provided by the aggregators that some job boards have any listings at all.

The success the job search sites have had — especially in making sales — suggests that the predictions about the demise of job boards are overblown. When Indeed and Simply Hired first made their appearance, the obvious question was, “How does a site that aggregates listings from others and makes them available for free survive?” Both sites — and the handful of others out there doing the same thing — have answered that question with pay-per-click listings, employer traffic drivers, and some minor additional ad forms.

While neither company releases financial information, at least at Simply Hired the revenue is sufficiently ample to fund a staff of 50, according to the announcement. The new investment dollars will allow for increasing that to 80 this year.

Both Indeed and Simply Hired have expanded beyond the U.S. Simply Hired now operates in 13 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Some of the $4.6 million will fund further expansion.

Indeed has a presence in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain,  Switzerland, and the UK.

“Job search is a global problem, and Simply Hired is committed to reaching both active and passive job seekers globally at both SimplyHired.com and at other online destinations through our network,” said Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and CEO at Simply Hired. “IDG Ventures enables Simply Hired to continue to expand its international footprint with additional resources and facilitates our relationship with the global network of 450 IDG online properties.”

In fact, it may well be the partner properties that IDG brings to the table that will, in the long run, prove more valuable than its money. Broadening the reach of Simply Hired not only means more and diverse traffic, but it provides an appeal to multinational employers whose hiring is global and whose choices to reach overseas markets are nowhere near as extensive as they are for the U.S. market.