The Increasing Need to Go Global to Source Talent
While the unemployment rate in the United States has been improving, it has shown little net movement since September 2012. On the brighter side, the software development world continues to bring in a positive outlook globally with its ongoing hunt for talent. Years ago, the term globalization primarily meant opening a product’s doors to the global market, planning for locale product launches, and determining what it would take to get products ready for target locale markets.
An interesting trend in recent years has been organizations expanding their global engineering presence to attract local talent. Companies, especially larger ones, have been leveraging this strategy for the past few years, and what is now interesting is their expansion into emerging markets—and not just in the famous BRIC regions.
Another trend is to set up temporary shops globally to hire, train, and ready local talent for the main centers in the United States. Such temporary presence is still not very common, but when players such as Facebook are trying it out, it makes us think about its benefits in meeting specific talent needs.
Several factors determine the global positioning and places of choice for an organization’s expansion, and talent sourcing is one important factor in such a set. We continue to see studies showing top cities for technical jobs and yearly lists which provide good insight into companies' and individual's planning for their professional establishments.
Often times the talent source is not merely to attract local graduates. The number of established players in a region with rich talent and hopes of attracting such talent continue to be great reasons for organizations to decide on their expansion strategies.
As we see this trend—going global to source talent—picking up across geographies and among companies of various sizes and scales, one has to also understand the challenges to setting up such shops. It is important to acknowledge that in developing and emerging markets, people are being presented with multiple job options.
An organization cannot expect to scale in hundreds overnight. It has to carefully evaluate its hiring and expansion strategy specific to talent, taking into account the locale-specific parameters at play. Some of the core parameters of attracting and retaining talent, especially in emerging markets, continue to be financial packages and job perks, career growth opportunities, types of projects undertaken, leadership presence, and sponsorship in the center.
The other important challenge in global presence is building a successful engagement model. While it is not easy, the center should work toward establishing consistency in its global operations. An employee needs to equally understand some of these implementation hiccups when a new center is opened.
Such an understanding among organizations and employees will help set the right expectations in establishing successful global charters and a healthy competition among organizations seeking talent in the global marketplace.
