Expatriate recruitment

Like everyone else, expats want that next great job. But are they out of the recruitment loop? Jacqui Canham finds out

You are away from home and have started toying with the idea of a career move. What should you do: wait patiently for that mysterious headhunter of integrity to come and find you, or get out there and plaster your details across every online recruitment agency in sight, opening yourself to all sorts of adventures?

As an expatriate you may fear that by working internationally you have slipped out of the recruitment loop and have become, through the eyes of employers and hiring agencies, ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

“Expats are out of the recruitment loop, but only partially,” says Iain McNeil, chief operating officer at international executive headhunters Odgers Ray & Berndtson. “Brits working in Dubai, say, who want to return to the UK market may find employers don’t have a current track record for them, which makes them less visible on the radar screen.”

So what to do? McNeil strongly recommends expats keep in touch with “friendly headhunters” back home. This isn’t too difficult as most of the major recruitment companies have numerous international branches and are globally active. For many key locations for expatriates, a headhunter’s office on the ground is becoming more likely.

Recruiter Whitehead Mann, for example, recently completed a major assignment for a blue chip energy business during the war in Iraq. Whitehead successfully replaced a senior HR executive who had been promoted from a key strategic asset in North Africa and relocated to the UK. In October, Odgers Ray & Berndtson opened a new office in Dubai to cater for the expansion in demand for senior staff in the region. So cross-border searches are happening. But do they happen to the same extent as for execs back home?

Possibly not, say most recruiters. But that means expats simply need to be more pro-active. “You are, in effect, a ‘semi-valuable’ commodity”, says Ian McNeil at Odgers Ray & Berndtson. He suggest some obvious remedies. Keep recruiters informed as to who you are, where you are working, and what you are thinking, is the basic advice.

Sally Rowley-Williams, senior client partner at executive recruitment leader Korn Ferry International, agrees. “People working abroad have to be far more committed to finding their next job than if they were at home,” she says. “Obviously it’s more difficult to set up interviews if you’re moving about. In addition, you really need to do your research and find out what’s going on in the market you are aiming to move to.”

Or all that this advice is solid, expats might balk at the extra work involved. Life is busy enough already. One remedy for this that has been growing in popularity in recent years is internet recruitment.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of internet-based companies ranging from mid-level recruitment services that cater for below-board-level executives to vast ‘CV banks’ that attract millions of people wanting to display their wares on a worldwide basis. Some of the better known online recruiters include Monster, Fish4Jobs, BigTimeJobs, and Gumtree.

According to Cranfield School of Management in the UK, there has been a three-fold increase in the use of commercial recruitment sites to fill senior vacancies over the past year. Firms turning to job boards to find directors, for instance, rose from 4 per cent to 13 per cent, and 72 per cent of them rated the exercise a success compared with 54 per cent the same time last year.

But this doesn’t mean that online recruitment sites are replacing more traditional methods. Cranfield’s research found that companies are using the internet in addition to traditional recruitment methods in order to widen the potential pool of candidates and attract more applicants and not as a replacement.

“The current state of the labour market means that it is increasingly difficult to attract suitable candidates, particularly at higher levels,” says Dr Emma Parry, a research fellow at Cranfield School of Management. “Organisations are therefore spreading the recruitment net as wide as possible in order to find the best people”.

There is, in fact, a hard core of about two in five employers who do not use the internet to recruit, and have no plans to do so. “There remains a lot of caution and confusion out there,” says Parry. “Some people have tried the internet and given up, although the technology is only a decade old and still in its infancy.”

Not everyone is convinced that web-based recruitment sites are any good. “These sites are about volume, not the search for quality top-level candidates,” says Rowley-Williams. “You don’t get the same sense of security, confidentiality and discretion that you do with companies such as ours.”

She believes the type of candidates her clients are looking for would not use online recruitment services. “Most are too busy or too important to start trawling the sites,” she says. “The top-level candidates we look for tend not to be job hunting, but they’re often the ideal person for our client – that’s the nature of headhunting.”

McNeil at Odgers Ray & Berndtson believes online recruiters have their limited uses. “They can definitely bring greater empowerment for many people posted abroad; expats can reach the rest of the world at the stroke of a key,” he says. “In this respect they might be threatening at the lower end of the recruitment market.”

At the higher level of the market, however, McNeill says senior headhunting should be more personal and intimate; about getting to know who and where the good people are. This shouldn’t prove too difficult considering the intelligence networks leading headhunters have developed. “We have researchers on the job calling up all their sources,” he says. “A good headhunter will know most of the movers and shakers at the top end of the field wherever they are.”

Indeed, the lack of human contact involved in using web-based recruitment was a common complaint among respondents of a study carried out by pollster BMRB last year. Other complaints were that potential candidate details were out of date, sites crashed at crucial moments, and e-mails got lost.

But despite their insistence that the online recruiters are not a threat, most of the major headhunters now have recruitment websites of their own. Korn Ferry has FutureStep, for instance; Hendrich Struggles has LeadersOnline; and SpencerStuart has TalentNet.

This looks like a form of acknowledgement that for all its limitations, the internet empowers jobseekers who feel they are out of the recruitment loop, and is not about to go away.

Even so, it would be foolish not to keep in contact with recruitment companies wherever you are in the world. Simply passing on your details to be kept on file is easy, quick –and essential if you want a decent job next time.

This feeling of isolation for expats might well deepen knowing that the national recruitment business is recovering fast after several years of fragile market conditions.

In the UK, turnover in the recruitment industry increased 7 per cent to £24.5bn in 2003/2004 on the previous year, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In the US, for example, some 337,000 jobs were added to American payrolls in October this year. Thanks to these figures, a survey from job search service, TheLadders.com, revealed that 32 per cent of US executives expect their current job hunt to last between just one and three months.

Figures for the UK are lower than that, but show essentially the same trend.

Of people using online recruitment sites, a separate report, the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS) Summer 2004, showed 45 per cent of 13,000 respondents said the internet was their top method of job hunting, while 15 per cent preferred recruitment consultants, and 14 per cent turned to local newspapers.

When asked why they preferred online recruitment services, 34 per cent of respondents said they had the best selection of jobs. Job hunters also used the sites for other reasons: 30 per cent to obtain more information about potential employers, and 22 per cent to make salary comparisons.

The extraordinary world of the online recruiter

The number of online global recruitment services being launched is growing at an astonishing pace as news spreads of their popularity and success (see main article).

However, as the competition hots up, the novelty factor kicks in and we are seeing all manner of services, special offers and gimmicks being rolled out for recruiters and job hunters.

Monster.com, for instance, the largest of the world’s CV banks, has recently teamed up with Major League Baseball (MLB) Advanced Media in America to recruit quality candidates to staff the 2005 Major League Baseball season.

“Teaming with Monster... is a natural fit in helping us recruit quality people for the unique job opportunities available for the 2005 Major League Baseball season," says Scott Norwood, director at MLB Advanced Media.
Meanwhile, BigTimeJobs.com is taking a shortcut and offering free job postings to seekers on its network of niche job boards. The operator provides many job sites by industry and category, such as NightShiftJobs.com or XmasJobs.com.

Even Britain’s secret services are getting in on the act: the vast online recruitment site, TMP Worldwide, has joined up with Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) which works in close contact with MI5 and MI6. Potential candidates, through an interactive recruitment CD, and asked to sit in ’mission control’ and take on and stop a group of terrorists including arms dealers and drugs smugglers.

"We needed to work with a company that could help us give potential recruits a flavour of how exciting and important it can be to work for GCHQ,” said a spokesperson from GCHQ. “TMP helped us to do this!"