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

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

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

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

So what do they do? keep reading…

Don’t expect your American recruiting methods like email blasts to work smoothly in other countries.

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

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

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

keep reading…

Three years from now can seem like geologic time for so many global companies still picking their way through today’s economic morass. Yet HR leaders of global companies are already beginning to look ahead for when their company begins to grow again.

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

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

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

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

Kevin Wheeler joined us this week to discuss the global trends that have been reshaping the recruiting industry. In this webinar we covered how to effectively recruit across a variety of cultural barriers as well as how new technology and social media is affecting the global marketplace.

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

My younger brother Barak got married August 12, 2010. When we were growing up, the thing I knew for sure was that I hated him. It was the “hard fact.” There was no way around it. I hated him. Every time he said something I wanted to kill him (and obviously the other way around is true), and this picture is one of the few that I found when we were smiling and hugging. Later I seem to have managed to always have someone stand between us (quite like I see with my own kids these days).

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

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

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

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

“They Would Never Agree to this”

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

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

Total reliance on anything is generally to be avoided, but relying on something that shows signs of vanishing comes either from a misunderstanding of the present, or an ignorance of possible future scenarios.

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

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

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

Successful recruiting and talent acquisition in Europe has never been more vital to a global company. I’ve got a big article on the topic coming up in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. For now, let’s just talk about tips, tools, and techniques that will enable talent acquisition leaders to manage recruiting across Europe most effectively. keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

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

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

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

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

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

A raft of recent surveys shows that the recession is having a profound impact on workers and employment trends worldwide. Even though they measure different things — global hiring, immigration repatriation, and career trends — there’s a theme here, which is that the economy is global and when it recovers, things will not go back to the way they were.

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. keep reading…

You head HR for a regional hospital that has a 21st century career site and a vigorous branding and outreach program. Your jobs are posted to one of the major job boards, to niche and diversity sites, and to the free distribution services.

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. keep reading…

In no particular order, here are some bits and bytes of recruiting news that made it to our inbox this week.

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. keep reading…

If there was any doubt, the announcement today by Simply Hired that it has attracted an additional $4.6 million in venture capital during one of the leanest economies in decades is testament to the potency of the job search engines. keep reading…

Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its recruitment marketing that is matched only by an equally ambitious overhaul of its recruitment technology.

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. keep reading…

Two years after I visited with Israel’s recruiting-related and other companies, the country some call America’s 51st state has slowed along with the rest of the world. Says Sandy Erez, of assessment vendor HRVision, “The worldwide recession has not spared the Israeli economy from its devastating effects. Every day, companies are laying off tens and hundreds of people.”

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

keep reading…

What’s wrong at IBM? Not too much. The company hired 47,000 employees and contractors in 2007, for operations spanning 170 countries. But IBM’s global recruiting director, Alex Cocq, (featured in-depth in the February issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), says there is still room for improvement at Big Blue; most notably Cocq wanted to attain increased recruiting efficiencies and a decreased cost-of-hire.

keep reading…

This is a strange recession.

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.

keep reading…

One lesson recruiters must learn is that as soon as they are recruiting in a foreign country they need to play by a new set of rules. The trick is in learning which rules are different and which remain the same.

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.

Things are starting to slow down for hiring departments across the country for reasons related to the slower economy, arrival of the holiday season, and ending of the year. While things are cooling off across the country, a different breed of recruiters are gearing up to embark on a journey outside the boundaries of this country. While many of them are still working to fill position within the U.S., there are some who are proactively warming up for a long haul to fill the positions far in the future.

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.

keep reading…

“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.

keep reading…

A significant part of my work involves giving presentations around the world on the hottest recruiting topics. It is an aspect of my work that I truly enjoy because it affords me an opportunity to continuously learn about where our profession is headed.

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.

keep reading…