A Systematic Approach To Executive-Level Recruiting
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 Chinese.
Considering the growth and hiring activity taking place in some of the world’s key emerging markets, one may begin to see why many of the world’s corporate executive staffing leaders are spending much of their time these days in Hong Kong and deep in the rich recruiting grounds of other booming Asian economies.
One of them is Peter Wright, who, until recently, was vice president of human resources for the 73,000 people who make up the refining and marketing division of energy and natural resources giant BP, plc.
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, Wright 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 competencies 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 business 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">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.
