The COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted recruitment processes, accelerating many positive changes that are lasting beyond the health crisis. What hasn't changed: businesses still need to prioritize quality hires, but we're seeing that many companies now need to fill open positions faster than ever.
A significant lesson from the past couple of years is how talent attraction can look at traditional geographical divides as opportunities rather than obstacles. Many companies have embraced remote working as a necessity and this has opened up a host of possibilities – for a proportion of roles, borders have effectively disappeared.
This offers a huge opportunity to add flex and scale to functions that traditionally sat in silos, where proximity has been valued over effectiveness. Now, more than ever, it pays to have your talent attraction team and your operating processes united, no matter where they’re based and which region they service.
Whether your business operates in five or 70 countries, the wins are the same. When you leverage a global talent attraction strategy, you can compete locally, and on a global scale. That means the power to target top talent, provide key business insights, drive the company strategy, and operate far more efficiently.
Benefits of an efficient global talent acquisition strategy
- Improved brand awareness
Consistency is key – particularly when it comes to marketing and, more specifically, branding. When you adopt a cohesive, global approach, you (and your processes) are recognizable and trusted. The candidate journey – and subsequent employee experience – becomes consistent across countries, leaving you confident that your brand messaging accurately conveys what you want, every time.
- Greater diversity
Study after study shows that businesses with a diverse workforce are more likely to be successful: diverse companies produce 19% more revenue and those with greater gender diversity are 1.4 times more likely to have sustained, profitable growth. The great thing about adopting a global talent acquisition strategy is that you'll have a trusted team that understands your business, inside-out, along with the nuances and availability of talent in different regions around the world.
- Improved operational efficiency
If you operate at a country level, you likely have some built-in inefficiencies in your model and a greater likelihood of overreliance on recruitment agencies. Localized talent acquisition approaches often end up trying to answer the same issue but with different solutions. A global approach allows you to streamline operations – reducing associated costs, leveraging local knowledge, and improving communication concerning your specific hiring needs and skills gaps.
- Increased retention levels
Research suggests that most workers are ready for a change after two-plus years in a role. Rather than losing this talent and associated knowledge from within your company, adopting a global talent acquisition strategy that incorporates internal mobility opens the gates for exciting development opportunities. Regardless of the locale, when a role goes live, existing employees will be encouraged to apply through a centralized internal opportunities platform. This also delivers the additional benefit of reducing the time and expense of onboarding.
- Stronger social media presence
If technology wasn’t already king, the pandemic cemented its rise to world power. Everything from attraction to onboarding now has technology at its core. This has propelled social media recruitment marketing to new heights. With a global TA strategy unifying your brand marketing message across every locale, candidates will feel like part of a community, wherever they are.
- Trusted local knowledge
When you’re operating in different geographies, success is largely dependent on a solid understanding of the nuances of local culture – its unique business practices, privacy laws, current economic climate, and highly individual sales and service strategies, which differ all over the world. One of the key principles of an overarching, global TA strategy is ensuring that local input is incorporated to optimize the global approach for local stakeholders and candidates.
Post-COVID: A new world order
Moving forward, we’re less likely to work in silos. Instead, success will come from partnerships, alliances, and support within local communities. Recent experience has taught us that we may be geographically dispersed, but that great things can happen when we work in unison.
A global Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) model allows companies to be agile in a way that's challenging from an internal perspective – and in a climate where almost everything is virtual, agility is of the greatest importance.
An RPO model allows you to scale up or down, in line with current market conditions and organizational demands. It does this without losing knowledge from within the business, and without the need for lengthy onboarding processes. An RPO model provides companies with an expert partner to help create the talent acquisition strategy, bringing with them the experience (both global and local) and scale to operationalize it.
The number of companies opting for an outsourced recruitment model since the start of the pandemic has increased, reports Deloitte. This shows companies recognize the need for a flexible, quality-driven, and cost-effective approach during challenging times.
From a talent acquisition perspective, we’ve been reminded that boundaries and divisions are manmade. People can be reached and engaged in every locale, with a cohesive effort, and can be made to feel part of something bigger than themselves – and when we focus on inclusion, success is much easier to reach.
Leveraging the power and impact of a global talent acquisition model on a local basis enables flex and agility while delivering global best practices within a locally nuanced service.
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