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.

When the decision was made a couple of years ago to update its talent acquisition system by tying together all the company’s far flung offices with an SAP system, Microsoft decided it was a good time to rework its global careers face. As happens with companies that grow from a bright idea to a 100,000 worker worldwide enterprise in barely 30 years, Microsoft’s recruitment efforts had sprouted dozens of online iterations for different countries, different regions, and even for different business units.

Bewildered candidates looking for opportunities around the world had to visit multiple sites since there was no central jobs listing. Behind those career sites were different tracking systems, making it challenging for Microsoft to manage promising candidates.

Even in the U.S., where centralized recruiting has been the rule, Microsoft’s online recruiting presence has become so bloated that candidates can become lost in the navigational maze. The sheer breadth and depth of the content can become an obstacle itself, causing information overload that could keep job seekers from getting to what they wanted to know.

In the words of the woman whose job it is to bring order, and consistency, and, yes, excitement to Microsoft’s global recruiting presence, “We wanted a consistent global message for Microsoft; consistent storytelling and improved transactional capabilities.”

Margie Medd, Microsoft’s director of employment branding, says the work to update the software company’s online recruiting began about two years ago, when the company decided to invest in a new talent acquisition system. It made no sense, she explains, to roll out a global ATS, “but then have all these separate sites.”

Thus was born the recruitment marketing initiative that Medd leads. Her team includes recruiters, recruitment marketers, web developers, a validation group, and representatives from some of the countries where Microsoft has a recruiting presence. Not all of them work on the project fulltime (about 10 do that), but all of them have a part in developing the new Microsoft global careers site.

The team followed a methodical path, setting business, and marketing goals. First on the list was to present a consistent global message, perhaps a natural for Medd, whose first career was in marketing. No less important was to improve the user experience, making job searching and applying simpler, and more logical.

Not only an office software provider, but a burgeoning entertainment business, Microsoft also wanted a candidate wow factor; career site elements to “impress and inspire them,” says Medd. “We were looking for a much more modern voice.”

The end game of all this, Medd notes, “is increasing the throughput of qualified candidates,” and, she adds, “telling our employment story for ourselves. This is our brand to manage.”

We didn’t explore with Medd the recruiting challenges Microsoft has been facing in recent years from the likes of Google and the “name” startups, but the Redmond, Wash. giant has lost talent battles to these companies, as well as to hundreds of less-known startups. Even though it’s got a successful game unit (Xbox 360) and the much-maligned “blue screen of death” is mostly a fading memory, Microsoft’s recruitment marketing, at least the part you find when you search for “Microsoft jobs,” is uninspired. The U.S. homepage is busy. The message fuzzy.

There’s no doubt the company realizes that, as Medd observes, “We have been underinvesting in telling the company story. We’ve let others tell our employment story for us.” On its pioneering View<my world> site there’s a page that begins:

“Microsoft is one of the world’s best kept secrets.
That sounds funny when you’re talking about a company nearly everyone’s heard of. But the truth is, most people don’t know the whole story about what it’s like to work here. And you should, because it’s a good story.”

That will all change when the first of the new career pages is unveiled this summer. Focus groups and employee surveys, including “a healthy dose of recent hires,” gave Medd and her team a sort of mantra for their work: “We have talented people doing amazing things.”

In the new site, these people will be telling their stories in videos. “It will be dev to dev,” she says, meaning one software developer talking to another. Or one project manager talking to another. “There is a desire for authenticity,” says Medd, adding that the videos won’t be scripted or “scrubbed. They will be true to the experience.”

Job seekers will be able to search for any Microsoft job anywhere in the world from one place. They’ll be able to learn of jobs that meet their qualifications and their interests, via the improved keyword matching capability of the SAP system. They’ll also be able to quickly find out more about a job or a division, thanks to easier and clearer navigation, and less wordiness.

“Everything,” says Medd, “will be new.”

Meanwhile, the three companies I mentioned in greatest detail on that trip — Redmatch, CareerHarmony, and HRVision, are still kicking.

CareerHarmony

When Shanghai’s mayor went off to the pokey for embezzlement, it slowed things down for CareerHarmony, a company we mentioned back in 2006. Government contracts had to be reviewed, but all’s still well with the Shanghai contract for CareerHarmony. The Manpower company is doing about 15,000 assessments a year for would-be Chinese entrepreneurs who want loans or tax breaks from the government.

CareerHarmony has also finished a new product, called a Vocational Profiler, which it hopes to sell to local employment offices and outplacement companies worldwide to help students, people who are thinking of changing careers, and others decide what the best path is for them. The profiler measures cognitive ability (based upon verbal, numerical, and figural abilities); vocational interest (based on preferred activities, hobbies, and fields of interest); and biographical information (education, skills levels, experiences, etc.).

“It’s something I know will take off,” says CEO Stuart Marvin, talking to us from Geneva.

Redmatch

Redmatch has now split into two totally independent companies, one international and one North American, based in Potomac, Maryland and called RealMatch.

RealMatch now has what it claims is the “fastest growing recruitment advertising platform in the United States” for somewhere around 1,000 newspaper sites. It’s also powering Scientific American, Findlaw (where it says 10,000 legal professionals sign up monthly, and which came up first in Google when I searched “legal careers”), and Geek.com, among other sites.

For most sites, RealMatch uses a “pay for performance” model where the employer only pays to see candidates who seem like a match, based on a profile that’s graded, such as “87% match.” CEO Gal Almog says the company has spent a couple of million dollars improving its matching technology.

“We want to take over the market from Monster and CareerBuilder,” says the ambitious CEO. “Their business model model is obsolete. The current situation makes them very vulnerable. Craigslist doesn’t deliver a lot of value. I don’t believe in a free lunch in any business. A lot of the (posts on free sites) are giving you garbage; we give you exactly what you need.”

HRVision

HRVision closed a deal with Bezeq, the country’s biggest telecom company, and is making inroads in the financial sector.

It also sold to several government agencies (police and immigration) in Mexico, and to AXA, a large UK insurance company. Several banks and call centers in South Africa are now doing pilots with HRVision.

The company is going to release a 3.5 version with several enhancements. HRVision’s Sandy Erez says “the system also allows for a one-time testing of candidates and their subsequent comparison and ranking for suitability to all open jobs in the organization — which means that human capital management can be applied from the moment the recruiting process has begun. Candidates can be tested for their raw capability for higher-level managerial jobs at the initial testing.”

Erez says the slow global economy has worked in its favor. “Companies looking to economize and cut costs are looking into our program.”

Cocq’s vision was to move IBM away from its collage of recruiting and hiring processes to a single global process, with only slight variations for each region’s culture. He also wanted to drive passive candidates and applicants toward the company’s recruiting Web site to reduce agency fees and print ad expenditures. But could a site that features one main recruiting message resonate with a globally diverse audience? Surprisingly, Cocq discovered that the answer to that question was yes.

“We found that universally, people are interested in social issues and career advancement; they want to know that their work matters and that it accomplishes something for society,” says Cocq.

In June, the company launched its new careers Web site which features this message: Come work for IBM and make a difference. But while the message may be universal, the way the message is communicated to each user is unique. The concept is to hook candidates and entice them to return to the site, by allowing each user to create their own Web 2.0 experience. Candidates are invited to join online communities or collaborate online with IBM employees after submitting an application. They can also share online content about IBM and comment about it through a link to an IBM page on the Digg Web site or receive an opt-in newsletter.

“Our new site features a single landing page and then redirects prospects to a number of subsites or micro sites based upon their interests and preferences,” says Cocq. “While the overall message is designed for universal appeal, we’ve adapted how we’re driving traffic to the site to meet each country’s Internet viewing habits.”

It is not affecting employment across the board as many of the past ones have, but rather seems to be targeting specific sectors and types of work. Obviously banking and financial services, but also manufacturing and anyone in a semi-skilled job such as auto workers are especially affected. Needs are pocketed and specific. Talent shortages remain.

Yet, I have had calls from search firms looking for key sales and marketing people, and for R&D talent. Senior HR executives are in demand, especially if they have global experience. Sectors still largely unscathed by the recession – healthcare, gaming, entertainment, pharmaceuticals, and biotech – are still facing talent shortages and global competition.

The growth of global supply chains, increasing automation, and greater process efficiency means we can do more with fewer. New jobs are being created daily, but they all require education and skill beyond that of many current candidates.

This, combined with the different attitudes candidates and employees have about work and about how they live their lives, changes how we recruit and employ people.

The highly skilled, experienced, and educated will have an increasing edge in employment. And this recession should be a clarion call for an increased focus on education, training, and employment development. Everyone involved with talent will need to look at both development and acquisition as channels to meet their needs, rather than focus entirely on recruiting.

There are a number of permanent changes we will see.

Candidates Become Smarter, Warier

The first change is that many candidates will be reluctant to work under the same conditions as usual. Candidates have access to unparalleled information about a prospective employer through the Internet and its many sources. Reliance on a single firm for security has already eroded, and this recession will strengthen employees’ wariness about promises and deferred compensation. More top employees will seek employment contracts that include clauses that spell out layoff pay and benefits.

Candidates will probe positions more deeply and they will want more influence over the type of work they do. Prepare for candidates to negotiate what they will and won’t do.

Free Agency

Recessions have, in the past, increased the pool of people who decide to become free agents – contractors, consultants, and part-time workers. More people than ever are trying out life as independent workers. Many will not make it and return to the corporate fold, but they will be wiser and better prepared to abandon ship than they were before.

Many others will find they would rather work on their own than go back under the very insecure and fragile corporate umbrella. Companies will have to identify and take care of their key producers better than ever. While many firms do work hard to keep key talent, they will have to increase this effort and explore more creative ways to engage those people.

Charles Handy, a management writer and educator who has written numerous books on the organizations of the future, predicted that up to half of some company’s talent may eventually work as free agent, contracting to those firms as temporary staff, contractors, or part-timers. This will be a lasting change that is accelerated because of the recession.

Recruiters and HR staff will have to accommodate these free agents. Our internal regulations will have to be modified to make the use of contractors legal and compliant with IRS regulations and it may be necessary to lease employees, employ more employment contracts, and learn to share talent between organizations.

These changes will be fought by the legal department and more HR leaders, yet I believe companies will eventually have to embrace these ideas to be competitive.

Values Rule

Gen Y candidates, in particular, but all employees to a growing degree, are seeking companies that hold values high and make and keep commitments to their employees and their families. They seek environmentally sensitive, charitable, and ethical firms.

Gen Y is the tip of a spear followed by the even more morally and environmentally committed Gen M. They will have even higher expectations than the Baby Boomers ever did. While shareholder value will always be a core concern of the management team, they will also have to understand how important employees feel that values are and how close a scrutiny they will give every corporate action and statement.

Recruiters have to understand the values of the firms they work for and find better ways to match people to those values. They will have to also convince the management of firms that what they DO is just as important as what they say and that this emerging candidate pool focuses on actions almost entirely.

Flexible Work Arrangements

Employees now want to work where they want. The Internet has made it possible for most services and knowledge workers to be located far away from the physical center of their company.

Designers, call-center staff, sales people, some HR folks, and most anyone who works with information, writing, or data can effectively work wherever they wish. Only a handful of people – those whose work requires their hands or eyes on the work being produced – will need to physically be present. Even jobs we cannot yet imagine being remote, such as that of a diagnostic physician, may soon be possible using instruments and video from anywhere.

Recruiters will need to encourage flexible work arrangements and lobby with hiring managers to make these arrangements normal.

Recruiting will be more challenging and those recruiters who like to “fill positions” will find themselves looking for other kinds of work. Recruiters will need to be proactive, great influences, technically savvy, and adaptable to emerging work trends.

Russia’s unique culture is — perhaps surprisingly — not such a big issue in recruiting there. In the U.S. we tend to think of Russia as a very foreign place, yet Moscow is in Europe and culturally is not so dramatically different from Western Europe. According to Julia Repryntseva, compensation & benefits and talent director for Alcoa Russia (a company profiled in depth in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), the cultural differences between Russia and Western Europe are no larger than those between, for example, Germany and the UK.

What might be a bigger surprise are the enormous differences in compensation between Moscow and the outlying areas. In the U.S. we expect salaries in the big cities to be higher than in rural areas, but managing regional salary differences is mainly a matter of fine-tuning. In Russia, pay levels in a village may be less than half what is paid in Moscow. Recruiters need to be very aware that the location of the job and the place the applicant is coming from will have a huge impact on what makes for an attractive starting salary.

As in the U.S., job boards are important for sourcing, although rather than Monster and CareerBuilder, the big boards in Russia are Headhunter and Jobs.ru. What is surprising is that it’s hard to find engineers using these job boards. Engineers typically work in the plants, not offices, and as a result are not as plugged into the Internet as we would expect. Other sourcing methods, such as newspaper ads, are needed to reach engineering applicants.

It’s hard to predict how recruiting in a foreign market will differ from recruiting in your home country. The key is to recognize that basic assumptions (such as that all engineers will be Internet-savvy) may prove false in other markets. Going in with an open mind and speaking to people with experience on the ground is essential for successful recruiting outside the U.S.

I am pointing toward the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Bureau; erstwhile INS) H-1B quota for the year 2009 that will open its doors to applicants from around the world in April 2009. Every year, USCIS allows and issues 85,000 H-1B visas, out of which only 65,000 visas go to candidates with specialty skills across the world. The rest of the 20,000 visas are available for foreign candidates with higher degrees from schools in the United States, which is generally a master’s degree or higher. Most of the 65,000 H1-B visas go to hi-tech workers across the world whose technical skills in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics are in high demand in the U.S. and Europe.

And so for companies and businesses dealing in the hi-tech industry, an opportunity to recruit professionals from this pool of qualified candidates is strategically important for growth, sustainment, and development of new products and services.

Although principles of recruiting remain the same, it takes a very different approach to recruit candidates from outside the country. Below are some of the pointers that recruiters must keep in mind to successfully recruit these professionals from outside the country. These points are a result of being tested as a recruiter in the global talent pool.

Getting Ready for the Long Haul

It takes a lot of preparation, planning, and commitment to recruit in a foreign market, and so before a company decides to start recruiting candidates outside the country, begin by forecasting your needs. Once the groundwork in terms of how many people, what skills, and when people are needed is done, the HR department must involve the recruiting team in planning the process of recruitment and selection. It’s important that recruiters are involved in the planning process so that:

• The HR department and recruiters understand the immigration/H-1B laws well because they can create some serious implications for a company both financially and in terms of future global recruitment if laws and rules are not followed correctly.
• The recruiters clearly understand the goals of recruitment and the plan to be followed because they are the ones to implement it. Besides, it would also look really unprofessional if the candidate — upon becoming an employee — realizes that things are different or have changed over a period of 12 months or more. This is a genuine possibility because 12 months or more is a long time for things to change in a company, and this may include change in the recruiting team, the HR team, the management team or the policies of the company.

This is also a good time to put together brochures and revamp the website and applications. Unless you are Google or Microsoft, there is going be a lot of competition to recruit people from this pool of candidates. You will have to sell your company to these candidates using your website and brochures with information about the company, its clients, its HR policies, benefits, and employee growth plan/path. It will also not hurt to provide some demographic information about the workforce of the company, and to give the candidates an overview about diversity in the company.

Stick to the Timeline

I call the recruiting process a long haul because the complete process from identifying the candidates and getting them onboard can take as much as 12 months or more. I like to call it a journey, because you start off with no candidates and over a period of time, some these candidates become friends, some remain good acquaintances, and some get lost along the way. An approximate timeline would include starting the process early on — some time in September of every year — so that recruitment, selection, and completing of non-immigrant worker application forms could be taken care of by March of next year. That way, your company will be ready to submit these non-immigrant visa applications by April 1st when USCIS opens up the quota for that fiscal year.

Once the visa is applied, accepted, and approved, it will be mostly a recruiter’s task or someone from human resources to guide these candidates through the visa interview process and work with them on arrival dates. Your candidates can start arriving in the states around October 1 because effective dates for these non-immigrant work visas is October 1 .

By the time these new hires show up at your company’s doorstep, your recruiting team would have spent an incredible 12 months or more working with them.

Starting Early

One will be surprised to know that there is fierce competition to recruit these candidates on these specialty visas. Companies big and small go beyond the boundaries of the U.S. to recruit these candidates with highly specialized skills not commonly available in the U.S. Begin the process early before everyone does, because this can give you some lead time in selling your company. It also helps in building rapport with candidates. Starting early is even more important from a company’s perspective because the cost of applying for a non-immigrant visa has gone up substantially in the past two years. To give you an idea: just the application fee to apply for a single non-immigrant visa today is $2,320.00. Add another $700 to a $1,000 in attorney fee on top of this application fee. More information on the fee can be found at www.uscis.gov.

Starting early will give your company enough time to not only assess the candidate’s skills but also to assess whether it’s worth investing that much time and money.

Successful recruiters understand the premise that recruiting competent candidates from all over the world is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of patience and persistence. They also understand that dealing with candidates in different socio-economic settings across the world calls for a cautious and calculated approach. Getting acquainted with the culture of a country to which the target candidates belong to can come in handy during the recruitment process.

Switch on your salesman instincts and nurture a working relationship with the candidate by staying in contact via phone or email on a regular basis. Meeting the candidate on an occasion or two can be really helpful in making the candidate comfortable with the company. Clearly defining the recruitment and selection process will help the candidate make an informed decision.

Evaluation

Since so much time and money is involved in global recruitment, evaluation of the recruitment and selection process is a must. Evaluation in terms of company’s preparation for global recruitment, how many recruiters are needed to focus on this effort every year, cost involved per candidate, time spent with candidate before acceptance, types of questions that candidates ask, FAQs, etc will help in identifying deficiencies and strengths in the recruitment and selection process so that the same mistakes are not repeated again. Evaluation will also give a better idea about what regions of the world to target for these niche skills.
A strategy successful in one market may not be successful in another.

“Sumak was a dream candidate. He graduated from MIT with a Masters degree in electrical engineering. He had 3 years of experience working for a large defense and commercial electronics firm, and he was willing to relocate. But he insisted on sending me resumes filled with photographs of his family. He even sent me some currency from his home country because I had mentioned that I thought it colorful.  He told me and the potential hiring manager all about his family connections back home and how those might be useful to us, and when he learned that I was single, he insisted that I at some point meet his sister! I was actually afraid to recommend him for fear I would be in trouble.”  – Senior Recruiter, large defense contractor

“Rapinee was sure she would be offered the position we had open because she had the highest GPA possible from her home university, which was rated the best in her country.  She also came from a titled family and her father was a very important businessman with government connections. She was reluctant to interview at all and answered my questions in a superficial manner. She thought she should just be offered the position!  I was so angry (although I did not show it) that I immediately decided not to pass her excellent resume on.”   – Director of Technical Recruiting, Semiconductor firm

These two vignettes illustrate issues that can arise when recruiting someone from another culture. While most North American recruiters have a basic understanding that people are different, most assume that the person being interviewed has been “westernized” and knows our operating principles.

It is usually a shock when either overt or subtle behaviors begin to show how different our cultures can be. Even recruiters who have lived abroad and have experienced other cultures are often caught off guard by the actions of candidates who seem very much like us and have excellent academic and experiential credentials.

I teach courses in cultural competency and have lived and traveled extensively in other countries for half of my life. I speak other languages and I am married to someone from another culture. Still, it is often surprising how often I react in negative or positive ways to the cultural differences that are increasingly part of our life.

Those of us who are in urban, coastal areas work with people from other cultures on a daily basis and are often deluded into thinking we are cultural experts. Yet, we get surprised as much as anyone else. As organizations expand their recruiting to other countries and as different cultures mix, being culturally competent is critical to recruiters’ success.

North American recruiters tend to operate under a number of assumptions and unspoken rules. Here is an incomplete sampling of some of them:

• Interviews are more or less formal affairs and exchanging personal information or getting “chatty” is frowned upon as unprofessional.
• Degrees are only important for a short time after graduation. By the time someone has been out of school for 3 years or so, the kind of work they are doing and where they are working plays a greater role in deciding who to hire.
• Where someone went to school, where they are from geographically, and who their parents are plays little role in selection.
• Family is not discussed during the recruiting process except in a general and superficial manner.
• The fact that a candidate has been a favorite of the boss or that s/he has received special praise or recognition internally is either frowned upon or of minor importance.

However, each of these may be deemed very important to those from other cultures. Many cultures place great importance on family connections, titles, and schools. Bringing these up in the interview is expected and necessary in order to gain the favor of the recruiter.

Anthropologists divide cultures broadly into those that are collectivist and those that individualistic.

Collectivist cultures are family- and group-oriented. We in North America are brought up in a very individualist culture where accomplishing things independently of others is considered a virtue.

However, in collectivist cultures, such as those in most of Asia, the opposite is true. So showing your commitment to the family and the group is important to them.

Another way cultures are divided is by body language and the way people address others. We are all sensitive to this and we know that people from some cultures won’t make direct eye contact.

Others show bodily deference by bowing or keeping their bodies lower than those of people considered superior. Some call everyone “sir” or “madam” or use titles and formal names when addressing anyone deemed more important than they are.

Most North American recruiters are turned off by this kind of behavior. We like people who “look us in the eye” and respond to our questions firmly, quickly, and with confidence. Any different behavior often influences their judgment as to whether a candidate is suitable.

Everything, from how close someone stands to you to their hand gestures, is the result of cultural training and upbringing. These behaviors are hard to change and yet should not influence a decision about a candidate’s skills and abilities.

Here are 5 tips on how to become a more culturally sensitive, and therefore more skilled, recruiter. Multicultural recruiting will be more and more important over the next decades as organizations become more global in their recruiting practices.

• Tip #1: Take a course in cultural competency. Build up your understanding of different cultural norms and gain skill in dealing with people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. Most universities and many other organizations offer courses in cultural competency and a quick Google search reveals many books on the topic. Cultural competency is not about learning what to do and not do in a particular country. Rather, these courses provide you a framework of cultural knowledge that makes it easier to understand and respond to specific behaviors.
• Tip #2: Expect to be surprised. When interviewing candidates from other cultures, be prepared for different behaviors and try not to judge based on those behaviors or actions. Probe for competence and skill. Perhaps give a short skills test and make certain the candidate understands that you are focused on skills and competence, not on family or degrees or titles. Be prepared to spend some time in what you feel is meaningless chitchat or in conversations about family or other things that seems outside the expected. You may learn a great deal about the candidate and you will put them at ease. Schedule a little more time for the interview when the person is not a native of your culture and try to learn a bit about what the norms are of that culture prior to the interview.
• Tip #3: Let people have a preview. Email interview questions to candidates before the interview and even ask them to respond in writing.  This will give you a sense of their thought process and may open areas for you to probe when you actually meet them.  It helps them understand what you are asking for and gives them a chance to think through their answers in their own language.
• Tip #4: Use a set of criteria that you apply to all candidates. Make sure that the criteria you use are as free as possible of cultural bias. For example, a criterion that says the candidate must answer quickly and concisely may disqualify good candidates who prefer to talk and elaborate on their answers. Your criteria should be directly related to performance on the job and not on subjective and unproven traits.
• Tip #5: Separate culture from skill. The two stories at the beginning of this article exemplify highly educated and capable candidates who should not be excluded because of their culture. North American cultural traits may be the norm for most of us, but those traits are significantly different from those of people who have an Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern background. Being able to separate culture from skill, and knowing how to steer a conversation or interview to the areas important to you, are important parts of being a good recruiter.

It is often said, I think erroneously, that as the world shrinks we all become more alike. What I see is that as we experience more cultures, we become more aware of the many small but enriching differences we bring to our work.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

• Utilizing social networks. Although using social networks as a recruiting source has been a well-discussed concept for a while, few firms have found productive ways to truly leverage social media sites. However, as new approaches are developed that more accurately align with the paradigm of social media audiences, recruiting on social networks will become more mainstream. Focus areas include encouraging your employees to be more visible online and using networks to identify innovators. Key networking sites include Facebook (global), MySpace (global), Friendster (global), LinkedIn (global), Twitter (U.S.), Multiply (Asia), Mixi (Japan), Cyworld (Korea), and Xiaonei (China). Firms to watch: E&Y, Zappos, CIA, Yum Brands, Google, and Facebook.
• Utilizing video. While it may be hard for some to fathom, 1:1 and 1:many video has become a very popular communication medium, surpassing all other forms of Internet traffic. Second only to employee referrals, the most impactful tool for effectively demonstrating the excitement and passion at a firm is online video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then moving pictures demonstrating what it’s like to work at your firm would have to be “priceless.” Focus areas include posting on video-sharing sites such as YouTube (global), Youku.com (China), and sharing employee-generated “unscripted” videos on your corporate site. Firms to watch: Deloitte, Microsoft, and Google.
• Upgrading succession planning. A common practice becomes much more critical as global growth and large-scale retirement loom on the horizon. Focus areas include replacing retirees, improved succession planning metrics, adding external candidates to your plan, and fast-track leadership development. Firms to watch: Intuit, Eli Lilly, Deloitte, and TVA.
• Using employee blogs for recruiting. A practice that is finally beginning to enter the mainstream is employee blogging to support recruiting efforts. The very best firms use blogs not just to spread their message but also to answer questions and to make their company appear more “real” and approachable. Key focus areas include blogs by employees other than recruiters and micro-blogs. Firms to watch: Microsoft, Google, and Sun.
• Using mobile-phone recruiting. As mobile phones with amazing features spread throughout the population, recruiting managers are beginning to realize that they can be a powerful recruiting media. Key focus areas include text messaging, mobile video, and mobile-accessible corporate careers sites. Firms to watch: Google and nearly any firm in Asia!
• Revitalizing corporate jobs page. Recruiting managers are beginning to understand that pitifully dull and dated websites drive away innovators. Focus areas include providing personalized information to the visitor, Flash video integration, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Q&As. Firms to watch: Microsoft, Google, and Deloitte.
• Using a CRM model for hiring. I’ve been touting the values of the CRM (customer relationship management) model for years. More firms are beginning to understand the value of improving the experience at each “touch point” with the candidate. Key focus areas include relationship recruiting, automated applicant profiling, automated event calendaring, and robust lifecycle metrics. Firms to watch: U.S. Army, GlaxoSmithKline, and E&Y.
• Hiring innovators. Rapid product copying and the high visibility of innovative firms like Apple and Google are forcing recruiting managers to modify recruiting processes in order to successfully recruit innovators and game changers. Key focus areas include relationship recruiting, pre-need hiring, and tolerant/inclusive screening and interviewing processes. Firms to watch: IBM and Google.
• Recruiting globally. Recruiting managers are beginning to learn how to differentiate multi-national recruiting from true global recruiting. Key focus areas include global sourcing, globalized websites, and globalized employer referral programs. Firms to watch: Infosys and IBM.

Other Trends to Observe

Although these trends aren’t red-hot, they are emerging areas where a few firms have taken the lead and have produced noticeable results. These are certainly not going to become mainstream for most firms during the next year, but if you are an innovator, keep a close watch:

• Virtual-reality recruiting on SecondLife
• Video games as recruiting tools
• Online assessment tools
• Using contests to identify internal and external prospects
• Simulations for candidate assessment
• Inclusive recruiting (replacing diversity recruiting)
• Remote interviewing
• Remote college recruiting
• A renewed focus on internal redeployment
• Boomerangs (bringing back key ex-employees)
• Recruiting at professional events
• Using credit card/sales leads to find prospects
• Using analytics and modeling to predict future workforce needs
• A new focus on the use of contingent workers in the weak economy
• “Remote” college recruiting
• A focus on contingent hiring
• Improving on-boarding to build the employment brand
• Reality TV shows as a recruiting and branding mechanism

Not-So-Hot Areas

Here are some areas that vendors and consultants talk a lot about, but in many cases, there is little innovation to report:

• Outsourcing recruiting processes. Protecting your own recruiters makes this option less attractive as budgets get tight.
• Video resumes. It’s still hard to get managers to view them.
• Competency modeling. Too time-consuming to undertake during tough times.
• Large job boards. Always mediocre, and their value is shrinking.
• Retention. In a tight economy, only the very best will consider leaving.
• Speed of hire. As unemployment rises, there is less pressure to make rapid hiring decisions.

Final Thoughts

These are just my thoughts. If you have identified any additional trends, let me know (johns@sfsu.edu) or post them on the ERE forum.

There is no formal body in recruiting that “codifies” the established practices. In this article, I am attempting to help resolve that problem by compiling a list (from my 35-plus years of experience in the field) that can serve as a foundation for your actions.

Of course, principles are guidelines to point you in the right direction. Remember to vary your direction depending on your business situation and global location.

20 Principles of Recruiting and Talent Management

The following is a list of 20 principles, laws, or guidelines to help you design and implement effective recruiting strategies and approaches:

1. A well-defined strategy. The foundation of any recruiting effort is a clearly defined and communicated strategy that illustrates the brand message, target candidates, primary sources, and most-effective closing approaches (the who, what, when, and how). Poorly defined or communicated strategy elements results in wasted resources and weak hires. In addition, the best strategies have the capability of “shifting” as the economy and the demand for candidates change.
2. Pipeline approach. The most effective recruiting approach is to build a steady stream of applicants (a pipeline). In order to build a continuous “talent pipeline,” use a “pre-need” approach that includes workforce planning, branding, continuous sourcing, and onboarding.
3. Competitive. The most effective recruiting approaches are compared against and are clearly superior to those of a firm’s talent competitors. Because competitors will quickly copy your most effective approaches, a continuous side-by-side assessment of “yours versus theirs” is necessary. A sub-principle applies to candidates: because the very best are always in high demand, if you don’t have to literally “fight” for a candidate, in most cases, you do not have the best candidate in the field.
4. Employment branding. The approach with the highest impact and the only long-term recruiting strategy is employment branding, the process of building your external image as an excellent place to work. By proactively making it easy for potential applicants to read, hear, or see the factors that make working at your firm exciting, you can dramatically increase the number and quality of your applicants over a long period.
5. Global. For jobs that require top talent, the process must have a global recruiting capability. This is because the very best talent is unlikely to live within commuting distance of your job.
6. Target employed “non-lookers.” The best recruiting processes are designed to identify and successfully hire currently employed top performers. This means that the process needs the capability of identifying and convincing employed individuals who work at your competitors and may not be actively looking for a position. Unfortunately, most corporate recruiting approaches are designed to attract “active” candidates.
7. Speed. Making fast hiring decisions is essential whenever a candidate in high demand decides to make a job switch. Top candidates must be hired using “their” decision timetable. Research shows that top candidates are off the market in less than half of the normal corporate time to fill.
8. Sourcing is critical. If you don’t utilize sources that attract a high percentage of top performers, it is unlikely you will make a quality hire. After employment branding, effective sourcing is the most critical element of the recruiting process. Generally, the most effective source is employee referrals. Other effective but under-used sources include recruiting at professional events and contests. Using ineffective sources means that you must spend inordinate amounts of time and money on candidate screening in order to avoid a weak hire. The source that is used must be shift, depending on the type of candidate required for that position. Unfortunately, many recruiters use the same exact sourcing scheme for every job.
9. Data-based decisions. Base decisions on sources, screening tools, and which individual to hire on facts and data, not emotion or even common practices. Making decisions based on objective data helps eliminate biases and causes the recruiting process to produce more consistent, reliable, and high-quality results. It’s also true that in a fast-changing world, “what works” changes quickly so recruiting practices become obsolete quickly. Unfortunately, rather than being a small part of recruiting decisions, emotions and “it’s the way we’ve always done it” tend to dominate corporate decision-making.
10. Build a recruiting culture. The most effective approaches build a corporate-wide “cultural of recruiting” where every manager and employee is a recruiter. Because of their continuous contact and interaction with outside talent, everyone must play an important supplemental role in identifying talent and in spreading the employment brand. The most effective recruiting strategies convince employees to be 24/7 talent scouts, making every employee a recruiter.
11. A candidate-centric approach. Focus the process on the candidate’s needs, their job selection criteria, and the candidate experience. A significant part of recruiting is “selling” the candidate on applying for and accepting the job. At least in part, recruiting must follow the customer relationship management (CRM) and the sales and marketing models. Often, the number-one reason why candidates reject job offers is the way that they were treated during the hiring process. It’s also important to note that candidates may be current or future customers, so treating them poorly can directly impact future revenue.
12. Prioritize jobs and targets. Effective recruiting processes maximize resource utilization by identifying and focusing on the positions with the highest business impact. That generally means revenue-producing and revenue-impact jobs, as well as jobs in high margin and rapid growth business units. The process should also target high-impact individuals known as top performers, innovators, and gamechangers.
13. Managers are the delivery system. Although corporate recruiting designs the process, managers “deliver” and execute a significant part of that process. As a result, hiring managers must understand its elements and support its precise execution. You must effectively demonstrate to individual hiring managers that they will suffer whenever a bad or “butts in chairs” hire is made. Therefore, recruiting must make a strong business case to individual hiring managers that convinces them of the importance of executing the process precisely. The most effective way of influencing hiring managers is by converting recruiting results into their dollar impact on that individual manager’s revenue and profit.
14. Diversity. An effective recruiting process must include enough variation and personalization to meet the unique needs of diverse individuals from around the world. Diversity and inclusiveness are becoming not just legal terms but critical components in building global sales.
15. Selling applicants. The very best recruiting processes builds “relationships” with potential applicants over time in order to increase their level of trust and interest. Unfortunately, no amount of benefits or job features will be convincing to high-demand applicants without this level of trust. Because all candidate-screening processes have flaws, stretching out the assessment process over time allows you to learn more about the candidate and decrease the chances of making a bad hire. The best approaches are designed to take advantage of the fact that a target candidate’s willingness to consider a new job changes quite rapidly, as a result of changes in their own job and organization.
16. Technology. The best processes rely heavily on technology and the Web in all aspects of the recruiting process. Technology can improve screening, increased hiring speed, cut costs, and provide the firm with the capability of hiring globally.
17. Integration. Recruiting processes must be integrated with other HR processes. Those recruiting processes that operate independently rather than in unison with other HR functions like relocation and compensation will produce diminished results.
18. Talent shortages. Although industries often face talent shortages, individual firms can actually have a surplus of candidates if they have a strong employment brand, a great referral program, and a candidate-friendly hiring approach. For example, handsome movie stars seldom have difficulty getting “dates” even when the average “Joe” can’t find a single one. Talent shortages are relative and depend on your image and what you have to offer.
19. Remote work options. Offering candidates remote work options dramatically increases the candidate pool. Firms that have the capability of managing candidates who work from remote locations have a distinct competitive advantage. They can attract the top performer who doesn’t live in the area, who desires working at home, or who isn’t willing to make a long commute.
20. Metrics and rewards impact recruiting. Every aspect of recruiting improves dramatically when managers and employees are measured, recognized, and rewarded for their contribution to recruiting. By convincing senior management and HR to place metrics and rewards on key aspects of recruiting, you send a clear message about its importance.

Final Thoughts

Almost every business function has come to realize that if you want consistency and excellent results, you must clearly define the rules of the game. There are, of course, exceptions and perhaps even additions that can be made to the principles outlined above.

But, after working with recruiters and recruiting managers from hundreds of companies, I found that these guidelines will give you a pretty good idea of the essential laws of recruiting and where to focus your efforts if you want superior recruiting results.

Alan Tonelson, who represents small- and medium-sized manufacturers, called this “ultimately a losing proposition” and feels that no amount of labor-saving technology can offset the low wages, huge pools of workers, and lower overall capital costs in China, India, and some Third World nations.

In his book, Race to the Bottom, he writes that the United States “will never be able to compete with them simply by cost-cutting.”

He points out that in the past 10 years, imports have gained a larger share of the U.S. home market, and that free trade agreements, beginning with NAFTA in 1994, fueled a surge in imports by ‘’sending jobs, production and, increasingly, research and development overseas.”

In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal, he acknowledged that some U.S. manufacturers (i.e., Illinois-based equipment company Caterpillar) have managed to “keep their employment levels pretty high by cutting wages.”

He highlights its “two-tier wage systems” where workers are now making $10 to $14 an hour at jobs that had paid double that or more.

He thinks that ultimately, the U.S. middle class will be gutted.

”The division of the country into a relatively small number of high-income earners and a much larger pool of working poor will greatly accelerate. In other words, the social profile of the United States will start to resemble that of Third World countries,” he said.

There’s a largely untapped source of talented Americans working overseas. Many of these expatriates are keen to return home but find it difficult to get a lucrative assignment within the same organization. That makes them excellent targets for recruiters who are willing to think creatively about sourcing overseas.

Non-national expatriates (non-U.S. citizens) can also be a superb source of global talent to tap into because of the unique skills and experience they can bring. It’s worth exploring their unique circumstances to determine whether your firm can assist great candidates in obtaining visas.

As Australia, Canada, the countries of the U.K., and some others have highly educated workforces with similar working environments and a common language to the U.S., they provide fertile ground for recruiters seeking to bring the best people on board, if they can’t be found locally. Recruiters in these countries should look to source candidates from each other’s regions because of the similarities.

Why Global Candidates

Global candidates and expatriates in general are particularly valuable because of the experiences they have gained abroad, working in different cultures and environments, and are networked in ways that many of your local candidates aren’t because of their exposure to different markets.

Expats bring the best of everything to the relationship, including knowledge of your market, and that of one or several others, depending on where they have worked and for how long. They also have to demonstrate resilience, even in relatively similar working environments such as the U.K. and Australia, where there are subtle differences in the way people work and how they think about the role of work in their lives.

People who take on roles in different countries have to adapt to different cultures and ways of working even if the language spoken is the same or customs are similar. Individuals who successfully complete foreign assignments demonstrate flexibility and commitment to their organizations. They’re keen to try new things and to take on challenges. Those are traits that can benefit any company and should be pursued with vigor.

Expatriate assignments typically have a low rate of success, with most failed assignments ending within the first six months. The reasons for this are varied, and in many cases, depend upon the individual circumstances.

For those who do complete international assignments, many will find at the end that there’s no comparable job within the organization to return to and then must scramble for employment prior to leaving the overseas post. This can be a great cause of frustration for people wanting to return home, and provides opportunities for recruiters to engage with and bring such people onboard.

When working in Europe, Asia, or any country, expatriates often have trouble getting employers’ attention at home because of the distance between them, or assumptions made by recruiters that they do not have work eligibility. Resumes with foreign addresses can automatically turn recruiters off, when they should instead be looking deeper to see what the candidate has done, and of course, if they might actually be citizens or permanent residents. Candidates, of course, have a responsibility to make their eligibility clear up front, in as obvious a way as possible, if they want to be taken seriously for roles while overseas.

When assessing global expatriate candidates, eligibility should be the first screen to apply but it’s important to remember that most people sent overseas are the top talent in an organization or at least high-potential employees, and it may be worth investigating the ways of obtaining working visas for such candidates should they require it to work in your country.

Get Creative About Sourcing

To attract global candidates, there are a number of things you can do:

1. Advertise locally. Consider advertising roles in the country you are targeting, but do so in the most effective local manner. In Australia, the Friday Financial Review is the best place to advertise for senior-level and C-level roles. Similarly, the front and business sections of the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald are a great way to reach out to large numbers of candidates for mid- to senior-level positions and candidates know this, so they check these papers weekly. Another option in any country is to advertise on local job boards. Given the large volume of applicants this method can produce, this approach requires that you pre-screen candidates for eligibility to work in your country as a starting point, but is a good way to reach a potentially untapped pool of candidates.
2. Contact expatriate associations. Take the opportunity to post jobs with local American or other foreign associations abroad. Such associations or clubs are often a haven for U.S. citizens and others living away from home and are used as a main way of networking and keeping abreast of things in the home nation. Contact these groups and ask them to circulate your open roles to their members by email, in newsletters, or via their website. Take a long-term view of such strategies. While they may not garner the perfect candidate for a particular search, they are invaluable for putting you in touch with great people in other markets, who may be able to recommend candidates at home, or could even help you with business contacts in other countries.
3. Use your local office. Take advantage of your foreign office contacts to help you find candidates. Tap into the resources and employee pool of people in other markets within your firm. They are bound to know great individuals who either work within the organization locally, or who have approached them for roles overseas. For multinational organizations, this is a simple way to reach global candidates in which you have a distinct advantage over other smaller or national organizations, so use it. Have local recruitment teams advertise on your behalf and work together to short-list candidates. Where possible, do video conferences with those on the short list. It’s a small investment for the right candidate. If your firm is quite sophisticated, you may have mechanisms that allow people to move between global branches and where possible, use those too. If you don’t have formalized processes to make this happen, then use your networks, or build networks with your global colleagues informally. Limit your communications to HR or recruitment teams only if you fear that open advertising will produce too many applications from staff who want international assignments and your firm cannot or is not equipped to manage this. Networking with other recruiters within your own organization to share candidates and contacts is a great way to build your profile as well as to source new employees.
4. Work with local search firms. In Sydney, and across Australia, a great deal of recruitment is still done by agencies and search firms. Corporate recruitment teams exist in many organizations, particularly large or global ones with U.S. parents, and they often also use Web-based recruitment systems, but ties to the agency world are still prevalent in Australia’s largest businesses. Some companies are using the increasingly popular recruitment process outsourcing arrangements, but many in Australia still have preferred supplier agreements with a number of agencies at reasonable rates that do all their sourcing for them. Partnering with one or two agencies that specialize in your industry or within a functional area is a great way to locate talent. To find out which agencies to use in a given market, ask the local recruitment team of your firm to make recommendations, which might enable you to get the same preferred rates they enjoy.
5. Share candidates. Consider sharing candidates with other recruiters through various forums and channels. Use things like the split boards on ERE or other recruiters in your network to help the candidate and yourself. Ensure that when you attend conferences, you seek out vendors and suppliers from other countries including Canada, and try to meet as many foreign recruiters as possible.
6. Go out of your way for the best candidates. Talented people always have options and are in demand. They don’t have to work for your company but they might want to. If you do talk to expatriate candidates, ask if they will require re-location instead of assuming they will. Be honest if you can’t provide it, but don’t rule them out immediately just because they are overseas today. In most cases, costs for returning the employee and his or her family from an assignment will be met by the employer either through contract or local legal obligations. In addition, the expat could be planning a return or home trip very soon, forgoing the need for any investment in long-distance communications through the recruitment process.

View global experience positively rather than as time spent out of the loop. Just because the experience has been gained in a local company or subsidiary office, rather than in corporate headquarters, does not make it any less relevant. In fact, it may make it more so.

Markets abroad are vibrant and challenging, and global work environments often present situations to foreign employees that would never have been faced at home, making for a truly well rounded employee.

Some people go abroad to turn an operation around, or to open a new arm of the business elsewhere. Others go to explore and develop relationships or businesses in the emerging markets of Asia and India. These skills could be just what you are looking for. The value such candidates can bring from time spent overseas is worth the investment of a phone call at least.

Part of the challenge for the world’s largest non-alcoholic beverage company was determining how to transform and grow its service delivery model consistently, from Cairo to Johannesburg, and everywhere in between.

“We wanted a quick, low-cost implementation, simple design, and ease of use,” says Valerie Kennerson, director of strategic talent sourcing and selection. “We needed sustained administration and accessibility across the entire continent.”

So earlier this year, the company chose to implement a new recruiting-technology system in its Coca-Cola Africa human resources functions. It also established the Coca-Cola Africa talent acquisition group in the company’s newly created Center of Excellence.

“It’s all about profit, people, and portfolios,” says Kevin Shigley, HR manager of technology and metrics. He notes that the company’s main objectives in Africa included:

• Accelerating the growth of the brand
• Developing and investing in the people
• Keeping products affordable
• Giving back to the communities

The Results

The Coca-Cola Company says it completed the implementation (using Peopleclick’s RMS product) on time and on budget.

“We did it all under three months and it cost under $20,000. We were psyched about that time and price, and what we were able to develop,” says Shigley.

The company now uses the system to manage the acquisition of salaried and hourly employees from four divisional offices in Cairo, Egypt; Lagos, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Nairobi, Kenya.

With 40 bottling partners on the continent, and more than 170 bottling plants, it also uses the system to manage the entire employee recruitment process, from candidate identification and pre-screening to qualification and selection.

“I was struck by how fast the system worked there; in fact, sometimes it worked faster than at our corporate headquarters [in Atlanta],” says Shigley.

There were minor bumps in the road assimilating all users and moving them from paper-based applications to electronic applications, though “that is a challenge of the first, second, and third worlds. We have been there since February 2006, so it’s still a journey for us,” Kennerson adds.

A few things that Shigley says he noted while spending time implementing the solution in Africa was that the workers were disciplined but entrepreneurial and also highly collaborative. He says he sensed that although they are global in scale, “everything they do they do at a local level.”

The company, which notes a 60-to-90-day improvement in days to fill, deployed in English only.

“Because of the large number of African languages, we chose English. We could not justify, on a return-on-investment basis, to use Swahili and a host of other languages,” says Shigley.

Meanwhile, the company’s deployment in China, which started about two weeks ago, will be in English and Chinese. The company says it anticipates completing the design and requirements with Peopleclick early next year, with deployment at some time in 2008. The Olympics are in Beijing in 2008, and as Shigley says, “Coke is a major partner with the Olympics.”

Almost 100% of today’s college students own a cell phone and, according to a study by YouthKnowhow, almost 82% of 15-19-year-old youths have cell phones. A recent Pew study indicates that 82% of those 18-29 go online to get their primary news updates, and cable television reaches almost all of those under 25 years old and most of those between 25 and 40. They do not read much, unless it is online and part of a website or an email. Most books are purchased by Baby Boomers and the most electronic bytes are purchased by Gen Y. Face-to-face interaction is less and less important to them for social events, for education, and for having fun. The electronic gamming industry has grown significantly over the paste decade and games get more realistic and more complex every year. There are students who date virtually and take part in gamming parties without ever being in physical contact.

Culturally, the Gen Yers are also a diverse group. In the southwestern and western United States, youths of Hispanic and Asian backgrounds are at a majority or close to it. African Americans are returning to the south and reasserting their own culture and traditions. Media, movies, and travel all reinforce the diverse understanding and tolerance this generation has for a variety of experiences. They are looking for adventure and excitement, but it can be offered virtually. All of these trends are slowly exerting their power on recruiting college students to corporate America. By the year 2010, these forces of technology, culture, and demographics will have transformed traditional college recruiting and will have caused it to re-examine what it does and why and how it does it. Here is Part 1 of a two-part article on some of what we may begin seeing.

Recruiting Virtually All the Time

Recruiting will take place all the time, rather than at certain specified times and places set by university administrators and corporate recruiting directors. Specified times for information session and interview schedules will have little or no importance or relevance to students. They are used to having information available on a website all the time. Most professors post homework, example problems, sample tests and often collect and grade the homework all electronically. I ask my own students to submit their homework to be via email and I grade it and return it the same way. All my lecture notes are online along with my PowerPoint slides and other materials so any student can get it wherever and wherever they are. Students expect to access in-depth material about your organization, philosophy, and even find out experiences others have had with your organization. Recent graduates and newly hired employees are already starting to contribute to their online alumni chat rooms and blogs their experiences as an employee at your firm. Through email, text messaging and blogs, many recent grads stay in touch with those still at school and give them the inside scoop on how to get employed at your firm, which managers to avoid, what to say and do or they offer up reasons to avoid your firm. The smart organization will have an up-to-date, youth-oriented website for college recruiting and offer a variety if ways to interview, including online and virtual interviews. There will be much less effort and time spent on campus involvement and more with getting students to the website and involved in virtual communication. Next week, I will offer some secrets to a great college website.

Virtual Internships and Co-Op Experiences

These students have been working virtually since high school. They are completely used to working with email, conference calls, with online collaboration tools and with streaming video. Good college recruiting will use these skills to create relationships with the students and recruit them over time. Leading edge firms will provide ways for students to interact with project managers, hiring managers, and functional experts within an organization. Perhaps students will be offered the opportunity to collaborate on a project virtually or take part in conference calls or online discussions about work issues. Students will be hired based on online interviews and assessments, offered internships that are virtual and be involved in work without ever coming to the corporate site or meeting anyone in person. This is a scenario that I have tested with many Baby Boomers and Gen Xs (those between 30-45).

Generally the reaction is negative and comments fly: “You have to see someone in person to really know them.” “You can’t judge without a face-to-face interaction.” “Being at our site is important to success.” And, while I, too, often feel this way, the facts are clear: It is not necessary to see someone face-to-face to have a relationship, to get work done, or to communicate. The Gen Ys have been doing this all of their lives and are quite comfortable with it. We are the ones who need to change and adapt, although I am sure it will be a long and messy process!

Global Outreach: All Schools are “Key”

The world is getting very small and very flat. People anywhere are potentially candidates for any job. Students are studying and working abroad more frequently and, while language is still a barrier, more and more schools and students are comfortable working in English. And, more American students are from diverse backgrounds and speak two or more languages fluently. It is relatively easy to get a work visa in many countries and many are encouraging young people to come and work for a while to ease the labor and skills shortages that are growing. Australia and New Zealand, as well as China, have relatively easy ways for students to work in their countries.

Given technology, there is less reason to confine recruiting to a handful of key schools. The requirements for a job can be redefined around skills and competencies and students can be tested to see whether or not they have those skills and competencies in the amounts required. Through online screening and virtual interviews, any student could be a candidate. The benefits to the organization are increased diversity, greater variety of students with different experiences, and the ability to ferret out even the rarest skills. Next week I will continue this series. I would love to hear from any of you who may be doing something different, virtual, or global with college recruiting. If so please send me an email at kwheeler@glresources.com.

But it is the small Israeli tech sector that is influential in ways that defy economic gravity, running America on its inventions like voicemail, instant messages, Microsoft operating systems, and Centrinos, as well as ingestible medical cameras that fit inside pills. On the highways here, you see some familiar names that have either set up R&D centers or bought Israeli startups: the Agilents, the Ciscos, the Qualcomms. One billboard advertises a new Oracle project melding HR software from PeopleSoft and Oracle. Google is expanding here too ó partly, it says, because there are so many talented software engineers. Intel is investing $3 to $4 billion in a new Israeli chip plant.

This country is not rich, and nor are most of its people. Actually, it’s tough to find anyone here who appears unusually wealthy. But Google’s recruiters will find a highly educated, highly literate workforce in a politically stable democracy. And, says TheStreet columnist James Altucher, “Despite what you’ve heard in the media, Israel is an extremely safe country.” Danny Yamin, Microsoft Israel’s chief executive, tells me that “over the last two years there has been a huge wave of investment” from venture capitalists around the world and from global high-tech companies doing research here. Companies that specialize in screening and testing potential and current employees are particularly hot.

One of these companies, Redmatch, sells recruiting technology to corporations, staffing firms, and media outlets such as newspapers. Redmatch, among other things, says it hopes to “make the endless stream of resumes disappear” ó well, at least the ones you don’t want. Candidates build profiles based on their skills and experience, such as “10 years running a magazine,” and receive listings of jobs that fit the bill. The reverse happens for employers; they can indicate that, rather than seeing resumes from every candidate who wants their job, they only want to receive job applications, for example, from candidates who have 10 years’ magazine experience and have led a team of at least five people.

Redmatch began by selling mainly to newspapers, and CEO Gal Almog says he has about 650 newspaper clients. He hopes to have 2,000 papers signed on within a year. But he has turned the company into a full-blown applicant tracking system provider. Almog’s telling prospective clients that his product can be customized far more quickly than those of the other applicant tracking companies, and he has recently beat out some big-name American applicant-tracking companies for contracts. Redmatch has signed on Ohio Savings Bank, the publishing company Lee Enterprises, and now boasts 150 corporate clients. Vertical search sites like Oodle and SimplyHired are calling Almog, wanting to partner with him. Between 2004 and 2005, Redmatch revenues jumped 80 percent.

Another firm, HRVision, helps companies around the world select employees. It’s wrapping up a new round of venture capital funding. The directions HRVision gives to its office aren’t those of the typical assessment vendor: “Take the first left toward the Dead Sea.” Its location is actually uniquely Israeli: a high-tech business park near 2,000-year-old catacombs. HRVision has more than 100 clients in Holland, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. At about 100 euros per candidate, it builds profiles of a company’s top performers, and then develops an assessment of job candidates based on those profiles. The company says that because high performers are used as a benchmark, its tests correlate far more closely to job performance than do interviews or most other tests. The tests have four parts: personality, intelligence, integrity, and a fourth which examines the way someone works, such as how they handle stress or how they work with distractions in the background. Kimberly-Clark used the tests to discover that although its forklift drivers shouldn’t be dummies, they shouldn’t be so smart that they spend all day thinking, “I got better things to do than drive this thing around.” A large beverage company used it to better select drivers who aren’t accident prone. Manpower has used HRVision’s tests in recruiting recruiters.

Speaking of Manpower: A few years’ back, two of its executives heard about an Israeli employee screening and assessment company called CareerHarmony. Manpower bought some of CareerHarmony in 2000 and now owns most it. Manpower has a CEO, Stuart Marvin, running the Israeli company out of Geneva. CareerHarmony’s aptitude tests, job simulations, skills tests, and personality tests are used in 14 different languages by companies like FedEx, Wal-Mart, and Singapore Airlines. A giddy Marvin says he has landed a “very, very exciting contract in China,” helping the Shanghai government test people for entrepreneurial skills in order to help decide who gets tax breaks. Marvin hopes to upsell and expand the Shanghai contract. As to how this tiny Israeli company ended up screening more than a half-million employees annually, Marvin points to the intelligence, education level, and technical skills of Israelis, as well as something less tangible. “Their desire to be successful is fabulous,” he says. “My experience in working with the Israelis is second to none.”

CareerHarmony has its roots in knowledge gained from testing people in the Israeli army. That such a powerful military is still needed is a source of frustration for Israelis. When their babies are born, the parents or a midwife often prays that they won’t have to go into the military — but knows the likelihood they will is high. Heavy military spending is not Israel’s only challenge. Despite pro-growth policies implemented by former Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the government owns too much of the Israeli economy. Job-hopping is popular. Inflation is up, as is the gap between rich and poor. Like in America, politicians are often distrusted. Israel also seems incompetent at public relations; a slew of American groups have been founded to complain about the stream of inaccurate stories about the country in the European and American media.

Although HRVision’s Sandy Erez says that “Israelis consider themselves very much Europeans — they have much more in common with Europe,” she notes that “we are still in the Middle East and that does have an influence–but that is truly understating reality.” That the Middle East merely influences Israel is indeed an understatement. One influence is Persia. As noted by the author Edwin Black, this great nation became an outpost for the Gestapo last century, changed its name to Aryan, or Iran, and organized groups of Iranian Nazi volunteers to go to Bosnia and kill Jewish people there. Today, Iran’s spending about $100 million annually to support a paramilitary terrorist group called Hezbollah which has killed Americans, Europeans, and fires rockets at Israelis in the Har Dov neighborhood in Northern Israel. Yuval Diskin, who heads Israel’s security service, is expecting a “new and worrisome wave of terror” to be unleashed soon by Iran, working with local terrorist groups.

But even in a land this tiny, the Har Dov rockets seem far away. Elsewhere in Israel, M.L.L. Haifa is making human resources software; its clients include a division of Coca-Cola. Malam Group is selling employee attendance systems. Doran Communication is designing recruitment ads. Not far from HRVision, ViryaNet sells workforce technology to companies such as Lockheed Martin. The ViryaNet products are used in the field to take orders and schedule a technician based on the technician’s skill, location, and availability. ClickSoftware, a ViryaNet competitor, is also in the workforce planning and forecasting business, using algorithms originally designed for the Air Force.

Yes, work here and life here go on. Marvin, the CEO of CareerHarmony, says that when he flies from Geneva to Israel, as he does about every three weeks, he feels safer than in other cities “because the security is so good.” Besides, Darwin actually said that it’s not the fittest who survive; it’s those best at adapting. Yamin, the Microsoft Israel chief executive, says, “I think what happens is terror is part of our lives in this area, so we need to learn how to live with it and do all the things we need to do.” Or, as Almog, the CEO of Redmatch says, “Israelis tend to live for the day and not worry about tomorrow.”

While much of the buzz these days surrounds Asia, it is important to realize that there are a vast number of European countries that produce highly educated populations and that yield the ever-so-popular wage differential. Turkey for instance has a labor force nearly 25 million workers strong, 64% of whom work in globally viable trades earning wages approximately 86% less than U.S. and UK medians. This article will focus on why emerging firms should look to Turkey (Turkiye for those in Europe) for top talent and provide some insight into the tools and approaches that work there.

Turkey Already a Prime Destination for Leading Firms

Most people around the world know that there is a country named Turkey, but few know much about it. However, if you were to take a college student from Ohio and plop them down on the streets of Istanbul, a lot would look familiar. Starbucks is packed, McDonald’s and Burger King are at war, and tucked between them in buildings several hundred years old are recognizable firms like Intel, Cisco Systems, Citigroup, Deloitte, and countless others. Intel entered Turkey in 1997, and has been working with the universities there to strengthen programs in electrical engineering and computer science, programs that will help grow Turkey’s high tech workforce well beyond its current four million. This might explain why just two weeks ago Gretchen’s JobsBlog at Microsoft brought to our attention that a Microsoft international recruiter (talent scout), Priya, would be combing the winding streets of Istanbul in late April in search of talented software design and test engineers.

Reasons to Consider Turkey

Here are some reasons your firm should consider recruiting talent in Turkey:

• Located both in Europe and Asia. Turkey is a unique country, in that it is physically located both in Europe and in Asia. Because it straddles the border between the two continents, individuals living in Turkey are quite familiar with business practices in both Europe and Asia.
• Long history of trade. Turkey in general ó and Istanbul in particular ó have been trading on a global basis for more than 1,500 years. More than any other people, aside perhaps from the Chinese or the Dutch, the people in Turkey understand the need for global trade and are well-versed in all aspects of it. As a terminus of the old “Orient Express” and the only land mass between the Black and Aegean Seas, Turkey has long been a major port of call for Asia, Europe, and North Africa.
• They speak English. Like many European nations, it is expected that professional Turks learn a multitude of languages, one of which must be the global language of business, English. My team just returned from a week in Turkey where I presented at a conference attended by nearly 1,700 business and HR leaders, most of whom spoke fluent English.
• Good education. In 1992, Columbia University evaluated the educational system of Turkey, a system that has been evolving since roughly 2000 B.C.! They found that this country, almost exactly the size of Texas, had 54 universities, 64 general high schools, 174 professional high schools and 211 specialty institutes.
• A booming economy. Turkey has long been a nation struggling with economic instability, but since major economic reforms were instituted in 2000-01, Turkey has undergone modest economic growth year after year. Current projections by Deutsche Bank predict real GDP growth of nearly 4%. With accession to the EU, the trend toward economic stability is likely to continue.
• Joining the EU. Turkey began negotiations to enter the European Union in 2005. Accession to the EU will undoubtedly spur economic growth and significantly reduce existing barriers to trade. While Turkey is already very “westernized,” joining the EU will force Turkey to become “more European” than it is already. If all goes well and Turkey does ratify an agreement to join the EU, they will join as one of the poorest nations per capita in the EU, making Turkish labor a prized commodity.

How to Begin Recruiting In Turkey

Like most industrialized nations, Turkey has embraced recruiting in the electronic age, and is home to more than 100 general and niche job boards (if you need a list or doubt our math, see this list). However, like in the U.S. and the UK, job boards are not always the channel that produces quality hires. The Turks take integrity seriously and have a work ethic that far outpaces many European nations, creating a situation that is perfect for referral programs. Add to that a culture that cherishes social interaction and employee referral becomes a no brainer.

Another sourcing channel that can leverage these cultural elements is event recruiting. Turkey hosts a number of professional and trade events each year and is also a prime meeting location for companies holding EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia) summits. Because Turkish professionals take relationships seriously and dedicate time to share in conversation with friends and colleagues over tea or Turkish coffee (most drink tea despite the fact that Turkey is famous for coffee), recruiting through channels that leverage social networks is essential. If you’ve ever been to Turkey or plan to go, you will undoubtedly agree that the Turkish people are outgoing and incredibly industrious. While labor costs are significantly lower when compared to France, Germany, Holland and Italy, the enthusiasm and willingness to learn of the Turks, is in my experience, second only to India. If you’ve recruited in Europe or Asia before, the process is not much different in Turkey. The obvious place to begin is by talking to your current employees and agencies that have contacts or relationships with people in Turkey.

If you don’t have any employees or contacts with ties to Turkey, consider finding out if any of your local universities have an exchange program with universities in Turkey, as visiting students and faculty can provide a wealth of information about how professionals really find jobs (as opposed to what commercial services may sell you!). It’s also wise, if your budget allows, to attend a few professional events there to learn what vendors local professionals gravitate towards and to network with Turkish peers face-to-face. Management Centre Turkey, for example, is a network affiliate of the American Management Association that sponsors numerous professional events in Turkey. Their business model is one that focuses on alliances and is a great place to get started.

Who to Recruit

Turkey’s educational system produces millions of multi-lingual knowledge workers each year, with high concentrations in computer science, business services, and hospitality. It has become a prime location to operate multi-lingual call and customer service centers serving both the EMEA region and the Americas. As a long time trading capital, it is also home to millions of professionals skilled in import/export and transportation/logistics. Outside the major cities, one can find millions of workers skilled in agricultural trades. The Turks are used to dealing with business professionals of numerous nationalities and have a proven ability to work well with diverse teams. Management hierarchies in Turkey are more similar to those found in Asia than Europe, so Turkish managers are used to managing down with little bottom up communication, but many firms have found this trait easy to overcome. International firms might also look to hire Turks into liaison type roles. I say this because Turkey is unique in that it is populated almost entirely by Muslim’s who have embraced Western civilization. Turkey is not East versus West, but rather East meets West.

Conclusion

You can be a follower and launch recruiting operations along with thousands of other firms in the current “fad” country, or you can be a leader forging new trends in “soon-to-be-fad” countries. One option leads to lots of competition, the other to higher ROI. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, recruiting operations in emerging countries like Turkey, Vietnam, Peru, and Poland are relatively safe bets. If you’re a large corporation, and you are still unsure about the quality of the recruits in Turkey, start by searching your own employee database to find individuals that came from Turkey. Next track their record to see if they haven’t performed above average in your organization as a simple test to see if Turkey is a country you should target. The time is now to build your recruiting database before everyone else finds out about Turkey and before they enter the EU. Good hunting!

According to India-based blogger Gautam Ghosh, there are more than 20,000 recruitment firms in India already. Many Indian recruiters, along with their counterparts in Singapore, Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere, understand that the pursuit of top talent is global. And in many cases, these recruiters have their governments behind them. In India, ongoing global promotions brand the country itself as a great place to work, live, and study. The government of India is working to convince the best of the massive Indian Diaspora to return home ó often appealing to a sense of patriotism and offering opportunities that might be hard to come by even in the United States. While I was in India last month, two world-renowned scientists who had been invited to the United States by American universities became so frustrated with the U.S. immigration procedures that they publicly declared they had no further interest in setting foot in the United States.

A Bigger World for Recruiters

Recruiters had it easy before 1995. Relatively high unemployment and a steady, if small surplus of talent combined with low turnover made it a cushy job. The “War for Talent” between 1995 and 2000 created a new recruiter, far more aggressive, far more technologically savvy and far more connected. After a three- to four-year lull, the game is again changing for recruiters. For a short while, some may get away with a provincial, shortsighted view of talent. But while they’re tapping an ever-decreasing pool of US-based talent, their colleagues and competitors will be nurturing global relationships and building their networks into the farthest reaches of the planet. Needless to say, the latter will ultimately prevail. Having recently returned from a six-day, three-city tour that started in Delhi and ended in Bangalore, I urge recruiting executives to get on the plane and go East.

I traveled with executives from DNL Global, an innovative recruiting firm based in Dallas, that saw the light years ago and has already built an impressive clientele both in India and the United States around the identification and recruitment of globally capable managers. As DNL builds its global talent pools, it will become a “go to” firm for companies desperate for the type of talent and thought leadership that can build bridges and create a competitive advantage in the global workforce. In the best Indian business schools and in the top companies, one seldom hears HR and recruiting discussed in their traditional sense. In a nation that has been the recipient of more HR and recruitment outsourcing business than anywhere else, India’s answer to skill shortages and sky-high attrition rates is an emphasis on talent management. Everywhere I went, organizations were immersed in strategic workforce planning and analytics. They were tying performance management and retention to compensation. Due to high attrition, “talent relationship management” is approached methodically and creatively in many of the business-process-outsourcing call centers I visited. Everywhere, employment-brand building, particularly through heavy investment in employee development, is a cornerstone of workforce initiatives.

On the acquisition front, Indian multinationals are nurturing relationships with talent while in school, building talent pools and enticing overseas workers, particularly those who left India and have built skills in the west. In the business-process-outsourcing call centers, some are reaching into high schools to develop call-center skills so that they will no longer have to rely solely on college graduates for the millions of customer-service positions being created each year. I’m not surprised that the conversations I had with business leaders, human capital consultants, and university professors in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore are so similar to those I have in North America. While there remains a massive income, poverty, and infrastructure gap between cities in India and the West, the language of business and human capital management is nearly identical. Human capital professionals and leaders in the West have as much to learn from their counterparts in India as the other way around. I had to learn this for myself, and so should you.