Nowadays, you keep hearing a lot about how the world is growing smaller. With the advent of the internet, you can communicate with someone on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes. You just send off an email or an instant message and the other person will receive it as soon as they are online. Technology has made a lot of things simpler for us.
At the same time, technology can’t take away differences in culture and modes of communication. If you live in the United States, for example, you’re going to value different things than someone living in France. Most Americans place a high premium on money and hard work while the French believe in what they call savoir-faire—the ability to communicate skillfully with other people.
When you’re looking for the best candidates online, you have to take these cultural differences into consideration. The candidate you hire must live up to your expectations as well as those of your clients, no matter where in the world they may be located. This is one of the biggest problems with international recruitment.
Finding the Best Candidates
No matter which part of the world you’re exploring to find the right candidate, there are certain things you need to look for, such as education and work experience.
- Education: If a candidate has a strong educational background in the field that you’re hiring in, this can only work in their favor. Of course, there are differences in systems of education around the world, but if the candidate has studied at a respectable university, then they’re likely to have a strong foundation in that field.
- Work Experience: This is generally considered more important than education. A person might have studied a certain subject very diligently but they may not be able to apply it in the real world right away. So a certain amount of work experience is necessary, unless you’re hiring for an entry-level position.
- Work Experience and Salary Requirements: It’s up to you to decide how much work experience you consider absolutely necessary but keep in mind that the more work experience a candidate has, the more you’re probably going to have to pay them.
- Work Experience and the Global Market: At the same time, work experience is particularly important in the global market. For example, if you want to start selling your product in France, you might need to find someone who has experience working with the French market.
The Hiring Process
So let’s say you’ve been looking through a number of resumes in the hope of finding the right candidate. And you think that you’ve found someone who sounds really good. But you know there’s a big difference between looking good on paper and performing well in the workplace.
- Interviewing Candidates: The first step in the hiring process is interviewing the candidate to see if their physical presence lives up to what they sent you on paper. When you’re interviewing candidates who live abroad, the first step is usually to get them on Skype. Later on, you can also fly them in for an in-person interview, if necessary.
- Communication Skills and Professionalism: In both interviews, it’s necessary to get a feel for how they present themselves and how they communicate. In certain jobs, communication skills may not be that important but in others, they are. It’s up to you to determine how important they are for the position you’re hiring for. But you can’t compromise when it comes to professionalism and punctuality.
International recruitment might turn out to be a slippery slope, where you have to look out for things you didn’t have to think about in domestic recruitment. Given this situation, it always helps to work with someone who specializes in finding companies the talent they need, from a variety of countries. At The Network, you can work with an account manager who speaks your language and will simplify the process of finding international talent for you.
