Global talent gurus Hung Lee and Tony de Graaf discuss the new reach of recruitment.
In a recent CHRO SA webinar, sponsored by TalentSmith, global talent gurus Hung Lee and Tony de Graaf discussed the impact of remote work on talent acquisition functions.
Hung, who is one of the world’s leading talent and recruitment thought leaders and curator of the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter, said before Covid-19, companies were trying to attract people who were aligned with their organisational culture and values. But that is now completely irrelevant because the pandemic has new implications for how organisations think about the talent market.
“We are seeing it now in Europe, where San Francisco-based companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have completely committed to the remote-only way of work at least until mid-next-year,” said Hung. “That’s up to 18 months of the entire business going entirely remote. Those companies are going to learn remote-only processes that will remain indefinitely because it won’t make sense to switch back when employees have already become accustomed to working in that way.”
This, Hung said, resulted in forward-thinking companies being able to offer $500 000 – a salary that matches the cost of living in San Francisco – to someone anywhere in the world. This meant the war for talent had suddenly become more global than it had ever been, and that there would be job flight from the super cities that have previously accrued all these jobs and wealth.
The idea that cities like London, San Francisco, Sydney Barcelona were just going to get bigger and more wealthy – because organisations would have to pay more money to attract people there due to the cost and standard of living – has been turned on its head.
Said Hung: “All those things are going to go in reverse. A friend of mine manages a global workforce and she said she's losing her engineers from Berlin to San Francisco-based companies paying higher salaries to engineers that are still residing in Berlin. And that means they are losing that talent. How they are resolving it, is they are offering those Berlin-based salaries to engineers in Poland. What do you think Polish companies are going to do? They are going to offer their roles and salaries into Belarus, and there’s going to be a cascade effect that forces talent acquisition functions the world over to review their strategies.”
Tony agreed that talent acquisition specialists are going to be competing with international business at salaries that they can’t afford. As someone who has been helping organisations achieve their recruitment goals throughout his career, he said employers would do well to hire based on time zones instead of geographic proximity.
Tony is currently the hiring success director for EMEA at SmartRecruiters, an American software company based in San Francisco, California, and he said the technology for remote talent acquisition is still lagging from where it should be. “Almost all big jobs boards in the world have been unable to post jobs remotely. You can’t post a job on LinkedIn without giving a location, which is crazy if you think about it,” said Tony.
Another by-product of remote work is that people are enabled to work for multiple employers. The old employment relationship, which monopolised individuals’ time, is going to come under increasing resistance.
“There is nothing stopping individuals from working for three days for company X and then for two days for company Y,” said Tony.
These were a few of the many insights that HR professionals interested in talent acquisition heard in the engagement with two world-class experts who gave them a glimpse of the future.
