The Global War for Talent
Special report from Hong Kong
If anyone need further convincing that the Asia-Pacific rim indeed represents the new front in the global war for talent they need only consider the fact that 464 of the Fortune 500 currently do business in China and that five of the 10 largest companies by market capitalization worldwide are indeed Chinese.
Then consider that the expatriate population of Singapore, for example, represents nearly one-quarter of its total population, or that by 2016, the number of people age 60 to 64 will double, creating what will surely become a vacuum for experienced management talent.
You may begin to see why many of the world’s corporate executive staffing leaders are spending much of their time these days here in Hong Kong and deep in the rich recruiting grounds of other booming Asian economies.
Wright says that corporate talent management leaders would be wise to adopt a systematic approach to their executive-level recruiting process because it can have “a profound effect on both the performance and profitability of your business.”
Key to such a systematic approach, he contends, is changing the mindset within the company from one that views executive hiring as a way to fill gaps in the organization structure to one in which the company’s strategy is the genesis for its decisions about who to hire, what management comptencies they must possess and how they should lead an increasingly global workforce.
“Success in executive hiring,” Wright says, “is about being adaptive and your recruitment profile has to reflect that. If you look at recruitment strategy, you should be able to see the link to recruitment strategy. You should, by looking at the recruitment strategy, know instantly what the [overall corporate] strategy is,” he says.
Wright, who addressed the inaugural Asia conference organized in Hong Kong recently by search-consult magazine, acknowledges that too few hiring organizations around the world can actually put their finger on the cost of their overall recruitment initiatives, let alone the exact return on investment that those activities are driving to elevate corporate financial performance.
“Where are you starting from?” is an important first question to ask, Wright says, before your organization can begin to level-set its recruiting campaigns, link recruiting to strategy and effectively track the results.
The former head of human resources for the BP refining and marketing units also points to the importance of market intelligence to link corporate recruiters to the information and external networks that can point them to global pools of talent to feed Asia’s growing appetite for world-class management talent.
