The first couple of decades of this century have seen the rapid expansion of our global community. The tools of the digital landscape have brought our geographically disparate world closer together than at any other point in our history. This has also resulted in a thriving, planet-spanning commercial ecosystem. Even small business owners today are able to operate as multinational enterprises.
This expansion is having a significant impact on employment. As a business leader, you aren’t just able to serve global consumers, but you can also hire talent in various territories. As such, you benefit from a diverse array of skills and cultural perspectives. Yet, for all the positives this offers, there are certainly some distinct challenges.
It’s worth taking a closer look at what the hiring hurdles for today’s burgeoning multinationals are. What aspects of your operations might be affected, and how can you best address them?
1) Global Outreach
Whether your goal is to onboard international remote workers or add personnel in specific foreign territories, you need to perform relevant outreach. While job sites like Indeed or Monster have an international presence, this is something of a broad method. Posting vacancies to job boards is just one tactic in recruitment, and without nuance, you will attract unrefined candidates. To hire efficiently and effectively, your outreach methods need to be more targeted.
As such, there needs to be a significant level of human resources (HR) expertise applied to your approach. Working with a globally experienced HR specialist tends to yield results here. While the HR specialist role is wide-ranging, key aspects revolve around implementing the most current recruitment strategies, and communicating benefits.
When your recruiters have a global specialization they can assess which tools and protocols are most effective in certain areas of the world, and what benefits are most attractive to local candidates. Multinational corporations (MNCs) that utilize global HR specialists have advantages in honing the recruitment outreach process in a locally relevant manner.
2) Communication
Efficient and clear communication is essential to the operations of any MNC. Communicating standards across a company can be challenging even when everyone is in the same building; when workers are across the globe this tends to muddy the matter. The same goes for your recruitment process. There are elements that depend upon communication — application details, job descriptions, interviews, offer negotiations. Geographical and cultural distance can very easily present barriers to this.
The first step is to put in place agile communications methods and protocols. Formalize processes that use the right tools for the circumstances. Don’t just clumsily use Google Translate to reword job postings or position offers in other countries; utilize native interpreters to correctly communicate the context of your text as well as the vocabulary.
For global interviews make sure that there are clear video calls. This allows everybody to be visible and get a good sense not just of spoken content but of body language. This plays a role in communication that is vital to both the candidate in assessing you as an employer and for you in getting a sense of their attitude as an employee.
3) Inclusivity
One of the core benefits of running an MNC is the potential for a diverse employee base. Yet, inclusivity can still be a challenge in this environment. The protocols that you apply to ensure you reach, attract, and support candidates in your home base country may not always be directly transferable to international employment markets. As such, you need to put additional effort into making certain that your methods aren’t excluding some candidates.
Language can be an issue here. While English is for the most part the international language of business, it’s not smart to only hire candidates who have English fluency. There will be international candidates who, through lack of opportunity or socioeconomic restrictions, haven’t been able to learn English to an expert level. These are valuable candidates, who are likely to have local knowledge and are able to connect meaningfully to their communities on behalf of your business. You can always make English language lessons part of your ongoing development program.
4) Culture and Values
The culture and values of your company play a role in your success. They help to direct your activities in an ethical and positive manner, and they inform your workers’ connection to the company. It draws a business together into a cohesive, positive unit. As such, your hiring protocols are likely to rely heavily on identifying cultural candidate fits for your company. This can present challenges when you’re hiring people from countries where the cultural relationships to work may not be an exact fit with your own.
One solution here is to focus less on perpetuating a monocultural attitude across your multinational and focus more on intercultural communications. This is an approach that places more emphasis on the shared experience between international collaborators, understanding that the values and cultures of each have a vital role to play. The barriers to this approach tend to involve assuming similarities between cultures, or taking an ethnocentric attitude — prioritizing your national culture and standards above others.
Rather, you should work with contacts and colleagues from the cultures you’re hiring from to educate yourself and your HR department. You should consider not just how your cultures may clash but how they can enhance one another. This will also help you to identify the right candidates who have a similar attitude and are keen to share in a meaningful exchange of cultures and ideas for the benefit of everyone involved.
Conclusion
Building a multinational company can be a fascinating and rewarding prospect. However, it’s important to gain a full understanding of which elements of the traditional hiring process you may need to address in order to overcome the challenges of multinational recruitment. In most cases, the key is a degree of flexibility — be open to learning about the cultures of other countries and adapting to the differences.
Noah Rue is a journalist and content writer from Boise, Idaho, US. He is fascinated with the intersection between global health, personal wellness, and modern technology. When he isn’t searching out his next great writing opportunity, Noah likes to shut off his devices and head to the mountains to disconnect.
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