Podcast | How To Build A Global Talent Strategy: Find, Attract And Develop

Author:
Gary
PUBLISHED ON:
January 12, 2023
June 26, 2023
PUBLISHED IN:
Podcast

Global hiring doesn’t mean rolling out one job advert to every single country! It means building a strategic approach:

🌎 Which markets offer the skills we need?

🤝 How does the hiring process look there?

❤️ What’s important to talent in that location?

And with 85 million open roles expected by 2030, it’s time to get ahead in the global battle for talent.

​Bastian Eichler (VP of Product, WorkMotion) joined us to build a strategic approach for finding, attracting and developing talent in this episode of L&D Disrupt Live.

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Running order

0:00 Introduction to Bastian and today’s episode
4:39 How to identify which markets have the skills you need
11:19 Being more data-led in the battle for global talent
20:16 Budget, benefit and salary considerations.
25:56 What’s important to global talent?
32:25 How Bastian’s team combine flexibility and cultural differences
36:12 Collaborating as a global team.
41:31 Tactics for L&D in dispersed teams.

Five steps to building a global talent strategy

A recent Korn Ferry report stated that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them.

If there aren’t enough skilled people and the volume of vacancies is this high – we’ll have to cast a wider net, be more strategic about where we hire talent and focus on developing people to plug gaps.

In this conversation with Bastian, we built a five-step plan for doing exactly this!

1. Find out where the right talent lives and build a strategic approach for those markets

Did you know that from the age of seven, every child in Estonia is taught coding skills?

There will be data points like this for countries all over the world, and they can help us identify where the talent we need lives. Think of it like this:

“It’s not just a case of saying we are open to hiring everywhere and waiting for talent to come to you. This won’t happen!

“Instead, it’s about saying strategically, I’ve identified markets where I think I can find awesome talent.” – Bastian Eichler, VP of Product, WorkMotion.

Then, you need to think local in terms of where you advertise those job descriptions. Which channels are typically used in those markets? What does a good job advert look like there? What are the expectations of talent in those places?

You can’t pitch your value without understanding what matters to people there and how they search for jobs.

2. Use data to refine that approach and understand which markets are commercially viable

“If we’re not completely sure about a certain region, let’s not invest in all the infrastructure over there by creating our own entity.

“We can still do that at another point in time, but let’s try it out first! See the data on how it works and decide how to move on from there.” – Bastian Eichler, VP of Product, WorkMotion.

Hiring global/remote people can help us test whether a market works for us on a small scale with low costs.

Let’s say we want to test a new market from a sales perspective, we can hire a few people there and measure the data to understand whether it’s worth scaling that!

We can also use employee performance data to understand whether that market is a useful one when it comes to hiring remote talent. If it is, let’s do more of it. If something is commonly lacking in those hires from a certain location, can we address that through learning and development?

The more you can build that data and evidence, the easier it will be to create a compelling case for global hiring and a strategy that works.

3. Consider the budgeting benefits and challenges of hiring globally.

Hiring globally can help your budget go further, but at the same time, you also have to make sure you’re benchmarking and providing a fair salary based on the cost of living.

“You pay a lot for a freelancer, but for this money, you could find someone in a lower-wage country… for us we always look at a fair compensation that’s equivalent to that country. We have country-specific salary bands, prepared by our people and culture team.” – Bastian Eichler, VP of Product, WorkMotion.

This allows WorkMotion to hire skilled people globally and provide them with a fair salary for the cost of living in that location.

4. Understand what global candidates want and how to deliver it.

Again, this is something you need to understand at the level of the market you’re hiring in, but there are some global truths to consider for your talent development strategy.

💡 24% of candidates are sceptical of promises companies make about job expectations, benefits, perks, and culture.

💡 As we were coming out of the worst of COVID, 68% felt their approach to remote working wasn’t clearly communicated.

“In a remote setting, over-communicating is not a thing… especially when it comes to the objectives we have and how that relates to your daily work!

“How can we support you in keeping the focus and not work on things that are nice little flowers along the way but the things getting us to the goal we want to achieve?” – Bastian Eichler, VP of Product, WorkMotion.

💡 More than 80% said they had and wanted autonomy in how they work and this influenced motivation and productivity.

5. Ideas for collaborating and developing global/remote talent.

Let’s tackle these quickfire style!

  • Establish the ground rules for how you work and communicate as a dispersed team.
  • Capture knowledge in short-form videos to not only replace long meetings but allow people to revisit them later.
  • Understand what can be done asynchronously to reduce calendar clutter and deliver more consistent experiences.
  • Educate people on how they can work and learn in remote settings: From understanding goals and how you build the knowledge to reach them to clarity on the feedback channels they should use.
  • Write a Not To-Do List! What actions will be counterintuitive to everything we’ve discussed so far? Signpost those.
  • Create hubs of remote/dispersed employees, allowing them to collaborate with like minded people when there’s no physical space to gather.
  • And lastly, bring people together a couple of times every year: “compared to paying for an office for everyone, the cost of bringing everyone together is negligible.