By Bahk Eun-ji
When multinational companies tap into new markets, one of their main concerns is how to secure local relevance, and to address the issue, they either bring in talent from overseas or hire new recruits there.
The former is global mobility and talent mobility, which has gained significance of late in tandem with the rapid business globalization, according to a leading international human resources consultancy.
“It’s definitely on the rise. Global mobility has always been there. Companies always have a need, so this is not something new,’’ TowersWatson Asia Pacific Director Cathy Loose said in a recent interview with Business Focus.
``Many companies want to expand their business particularly in the emerging markets, such as Asia and Africa, where the local talents are not available yet. Hence, they always bring talents from outside.’’
Understandably, the efficiency of global mobility surfaces as a crucial agenda for globally expanding companies and that is especially the case for Asian firms including Korean ones with relatively short history of offshore operations compared to those from the United States and Europe.
In the past, a lot of Asian companies attempted to find talent inside the existing pool to wade into foreign markets. If perfect fits were not available, they tended to nurture ones instead of recruiting from outside.
In other words, global mobility was deemed as one of ways to developing capacity of their employees.
It seemingly has something to do with the Asian value where companies focused on retaining the key talent inside the company instead of encouraging brisk movements between different organizations.
Things have changed by now _ Asian corporate leaders also recognize that more often than not, the existing employees lack the ability to meet the overseas requirements so they need to bring new talent from outside.
In a nutshell, their talent mobility process was an inward format of focusing on domestic talent but is migrating toward an outward fashion under which global talent sourcing has become a norm.
“So I wouldn’t say that they strictly stick more to inward than outward. They did that more in the past but now they also started to recognize there is a need to hire talent from outside as well.” she added.
Cathy recommended firms to begin with a clear talent mobility strategy integrated with a talent management process and to ensure buy-in and support from their key stakeholders.
And she noted that tailor-made approach is required to gain a success: ``You should avoid best-practice notion and one-size-fits-all approach.’’
There is another reason for Asian entities to pay more attention to global mobility _ sending workers abroad costs lots of money as it generally costs twice more than a normal package.
In order to manage the prohibitively high expenditures, companies have begun to look at different ways of structuring international assignment and financial policies.
Simply put, companies might have one policy that would provide all of necessities for employees such as housing and relocation allowance, living expenses and adjustment costs on top of salaries.
They provide the entire package and that’s the reason why the cost snowballed so as to financially weigh on companies. Now they think that it depends on the category of the talent _ they don’t need to provide such packages for everybody.
For example, their top talent the company cannot afford to lose would deserve whole packages from organizations, but for young or developing talent, the company may cut the corners.
Cathy Loose is the Director of Benefits and Asia Pacific Benefits Business Development Leader for TowersWatson. She is currently based in Tokyo, Japan.