Today’s installment was submitted by Julie Parsons of Premium Consulting in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Julie is a member of the NPA board of directors and an occasional guest-blogger. Premium Consulting is a boutique independent recruiting firm that provides professional and practical recruitment consulting advice specializing in retained recruitment, partial services, psychometric assessment and appraisals, outplacement and career counseling.
At some point, most recruiters or recruitment firms realize that in order to stay competitive and present a broad range of solutions to their clients, they need to go global. Some common excuses to avoid the work of creating a global firm include: “it’s too hard,” “that’s what franchises are for,” “franchises are so common, set up in every major city with multinational contracts.” Although each of these excuses have some merit, none of them should stop you in your global expansion tracks.
Try to set yourself above your competitors by keeping up on international market conditions and legislation. Your knowledge in these areas will be valuable in targeting where you want to expand and in what industries. One way to jump the international hurdle is to connect with like-minded firms throughout the world. A great place to start is through LinkedIn. Recruiters are pretty transparent on social media so they might be easier to find than you think.
Also, think about joining a network. There are obvious questions to ask as it relates to policies, operations and integrity before jumping into something like this, but if you’ve done your homework, your investment will almost certainly result in a positive ROI as well as global connections. NPA’s President, Dave Nerz, says “half of something is always better than all of nothing.” Yes, this statement may be a little cheesy, but he’s right. Could it be that the way to growing your reach is not through giant steps alone, but through half-steps with others recruiters like yourself?
What are some of the challenges you face with making your global footprint?
Hi,
Happy to see your blog…Completely agree with you. We are a search firm based in India and planning to go global. Though we have good international business in hand; we are not sure about the compliance and local laws of various countries when it comes to recruitment. Does it mandatory to have a hiring license to recruit globally? (Switzerland, USA and Asia) Also local presence? Any inputs would be valuable. Thanks!
Sam,
If you are setting up recruitment operations in a country then you will need to comply with local rules. If you are a supplier of talent to a local company in a foreign country you can count on your partner to meet the local requirements and do the invoicing of clients, etc. You are just a paid provider to the transaction.
I would opt for some of these types of deals before investing time and taking the risk of having a physical presence.
In any case you will want to understand local customs and expectations. For example on privacy rules and non-discrimination rules, you will need to understand what is and is not allowed in each country. Otherwise candidates will be less than comfortable with your recruitment efforts if for example you start asking of a US candidate, “how old are you?, what is your nationality?, do you have children?” none of these are legal to ask unless work related in some way.
Dear Dave – Appreciate your email. To give you more information, Our client is having its HQ in USA setting up offices in Switzerland, Turkey and Korea We are hired to recruit local talent in all these countries for our client. I wanted to know considering the client is in USA and we are in India, do we need to follow any local rules, taxation and policies in Switzerland, Korea and Turkey when it comes to hiring local talent. Please let me know. Thanks!