How To Recruit Expatriate Staff
The recruitment and selection procedures and considerations are drastically different for expatriates than that of the domestic employees. Recruitment of expatriates involves greater time, monetary resources and other indirect costs. Improper recruitment and selection can cause the expatriates to return hastily or a decline in their performance. A mismatch between jobs and people can reduce the effectiveness of other human resource activities and can affect the performance of the employees as well as the organization.
There are several benefits to multinational corporations using expatriates. Multinational corporations benefit by having a culturally educated workforce. When managers take on expatriate assignments, their exposure to other cultures and other ways of doing business results in the organization gaining in the form of more well-rounded experience. Expatriates also are able to facilitate communication and organizational coordination between the home office and distant regional facilities. The whole idea of providing managers with the opportunity to manage abroad, helps to facilitate global learning and create a corporate global mindset. This global mindset and increased knowledge become an asset to multinational corporations as they look to expand and optimize their global operations.
On the other hand, just as there are advantages to using expatriates, so are there disadvantages. First of these disadvantages is a lack of familiarity with the culture and language of the target market. Expatriates sent abroad are often not ready for the experience. They are poorly indoctrinated in the ways of their receiving country and sometimes can not meet the challenge created by the culture gap. This inability to adapt to the local culture sometimes results in the failure of the expatriate manager or in cultural conflicts or in a bad “foreign” image. Therefore, recruiting expatriates require special considerations and skills to select the best person for the job.
Except for a few expatriate selection policies, the expatriate selection criterion is generally organization and nation-specific. The recruiters for recruiting the expatriates should be carefully selected and trained. The interviews of expatriates should be designed in a manner to judge their adaptability to the new culture, intercultural interaction, flexibility, professional expertise, past international work experience, tolerance and open-mindedness, family situation, language ability, attitude and motivation, empathy towards local culture. Another downside to employing expatriate managers is cost. Relocation costs, cost of living allowances, provisions for maintaining duel households, and additional family expenses all contribute to the high cost of the expatriate managers compensation package.
As a result, although it is more difficult to manage the recruitment process of expatriate staff for HR, the contribution is valuable for the long term targets of a developing company. Therefore, HR should prepare the recruitment and also orientation processes in terms of expatriate needs.