I believe every IT multinational company who aims to expand its business to remote locations will encounter hiring problems. The issue statement is quite simple: talent shortage. According to the remote location talent market research reports conducted by my team, there is a quite limited talent pool in 2nd/3rd tier cities. Recruitment team found hiring difficulties in sourcing, attracting qualified candidates with required skill-sets.
Let's take Xi'an as an example, in terms of skill-sets, local talents from your key competitors are most relevant, followed by big BPs (business partner), and then those SI who have business relations with your organization. Then, senior staffs in SOE or your clients might be another option; Besides, Xi'an has fairly large R&D institutions which can provide certain talent pipeline for technical openings; Meanwhile, there are a huge number of small SI/Channel companies locally with fairly larger talent pool even though their skill-sets are much lower against your hiring requirements. (see the figure below)
The above MI analysis puts us in a much stretched recruitment plan that has many dependencies. No matter we invest how much on the existing sourcing channels but how many candidates can come out of them is a question mark since talent pipeline is quite limited, depending on how we could map out the target candidates and how we approach them. Nevertheless, you might take the following solutions into consideration for easing your pain.
- Talent Mapping - conduct talent mapping and get their contact info through existing employees, vendors, direct sourcing from job portals or any social network to proactively approach them or maintain good relationship with them for future openings
- Local HR Sourcing Capabilities – provide more trainings to local recruiters to improve their sourcing, networking, recruitment skills
- Improve Sourcing Channels –better leveraging existing sourcing channels, like local newspapers, walk-in job fairs, special employee referral program, local niche portals or mouth to mouth promotions, etc.
- Agency Partnership – Leverage headhunters or other recruitment outsourcing vendors to proactively sourcing candidates or establish the pipeline according to your organization's hiring requirements, provide strong support to local HR
- Delivery Management System – establish a management system to review pipeline and hiring data with local HR by-weekly
In my previous artile - "Social Recrutiment Survey", I have put forward the definition of social recruitment: Social recruitment is the practice of leveraging social and professional networks, online and offline, for talent acquisition. This might be one feasible and effective solution you should consider to put into your whole remote location sourcing strategy. Before you really tap into it, you need to pay attentions to the following steps;
Step 1:Decide who your target candidates are and where they are
Step 2: Set up a candidate relationship management database or leveraging existing social network for relationship maintainance
Step 3: Define your selling message
Step 4: Create a communication package
Step 5: Automate networking and recruiting marketing processes
What I talk above is just for external hiring in local market. To make a comprehensive recruitment stragety for Geo Expansion, you might need to add more into it, such as, sourcing strategy from 1st tier cities or other locations, internal transfer, assignment or employee relocation, compensation & benefit as well as career development plan to facilitate the hiring objectives, etc. If you are also supporting the Geo expansion mission from recruitment perspective, pls share me more your findings and practices.
