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Career Guides Career Corporate Human Resources Training & Development Knowledge Managment Time Management Stress Management Sponsors Ezboard IS Community-Supported Communities. Support us and your communities. In order for communities to thrive and grow, they need the support of their members. and we rely on both the support of our users and the support of advertisers to provide these invaluable services to you. Please help keep this site banner free by clicking here. Affiliates A Premier Provider of Management Consultant & Training Solutions. A Pocket PC Unified Body of Individuals in Singapore.		Creating Web Presence If your company or client is in the market for international IT staff, there's a tremendously effective and economical recruiting tool immediately at hand -- your corporate Web site. Firms large and small rely on their online presence to advertise available jobs and provide a worldwide window into the corporate culture. But a site designed with only U.S. candidates in mind can become a handicap when international candidates are also being sought. There are tremendous benefits to international recruiting on the World Wide Web, but it can be a daunting and ineffective undertaking if companies don't take into consideration the various cultural and technical issues involved. As the worldwide talent pool becomes more competitive, and businesses continue to expand globally, the need to develop creative, culturally sensitive Web-based recruiting strategies becomes critical. H-1B visas have been flying out of the State Department for the past three years as companies struggle to fill gaping holes in their IT teams. Early this summer, a year after Congress increased the annual cap from 65,000 to 115,000, visas available for highly skilled technical jobs ran out, although the federal fiscal year didn?t end until October. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) has called for upping the limit once again, to 200,000 visas per year. A trend toward what could be called "global telecommuting" -- the practice of companies hiring overseas technical workers who remain in their home countries to perform the job. Because of the nature of the Internet, you can essentially have someone with the skill sets you need working for you in Delhi who never has to file for immigration status. But you want to make sure yours is the company telecommuters choose to work for, and it's likely they will learn that by visiting your Web site. But perhaps the most pressing need for a multicultural Web presence is felt by companies with international offices or subsidiaries -- they are battling the same tight competition for high-tech talent in the host countries as they are in the U.S. The Web forces centralization of the corporation?s image, therefore, site design is crucial in terms of making information accessible to the entire global audience, including job seekers. It's imperative that the corporate Web site presents an image that will attract talented people who have a number of choices. Consider the case of an Irish IT professional who is considering sending a CV to a large American organization?s Dublin office, the first thing they'll do is check out the corporate Web site, if the site is too centered on U.S. people and operations, the potential recruit may quickly lose interest in working at what seems to be a "backwater" subsidiary. Recruitsoft.com works with multinational corporations to build interactive recruiting capabilities into corporate Web sites. Recruitsoft.com's proprietary solution allows job seekers anywhere in the world to access information about positions at any of the corporation's global offices -- often in their own language -- and answer a series of screening questions that will prequalify them. Paradoxically, corporations can both standardize and personalize the process of sourcing and sorting online job applications, according to Lermusiaux. The key is doing away with the resume, and utilizing skill-based screening technology that gets around some of the cultural limitations of the resume. Although Recruitsoft.com's target market is multinational employers with over $1 billion in revenues, smaller companies can benefit from their basic concept: Make sure you can provide specialized areas related to countries where you have a presence, and have your local hiring managers write the job descriptions and requirements. Technological Courtesy A company's goal is to establish a global "cybertrust" on the Web -- cultivating the acceptance of potential candidates who come to site. Like e-commerce, people who are scouting potential employers want to feel welcomed, and they also want to get information quickly. They'll want to know, "Is this a company with a global understanding that I can work with? But many corporations -- even those in the high tech realm -- don't understand or acknowledge the particular barriers encountered by international job seekers visiting their site. The first may be purely technical. "Keep it simple, and remember the e-commerce adage, rich media can make you poor, given the U.S. -- centricity of the evolution of the Web, most American companies use their home market as the basis for Web strategy, design and development. While that?s fine for recruiting U.S. nationals who access the Internet with robust corporate bandwidth, many international prospects don?t have access to a T1 or cable modem. Graphic intensive-sites can discourage people from staying long or returning later. Don?t be afraid of using text-based information as opposed to graphics. Anyone who uses a laptop to log on while traveling knows the problem, That's why the Recruitsoft.com Web template features a simple top-and-side frame containing the corporate logo and some key navigational buttons; the graphic elements remain stationary while the rest is all text-based. For people coping with sluggish modems, a site map can be a lifesaver. Site maps are the leisure suit of the Internet world, boring and unsophisticated, but critically important in recruitment. People lumbering through page after page looking for information are grateful for a place that can link them directly to where they want to go. Build one, maintain it and link it from your home page. A second barrier to international candidates may be strict automated forms that don't account for cultural anomalies in data fields like addresses, phone numbers, dates and academic degrees. If a form doesn't have a place to type in the name of a province or region as part of an address, or has no space to type a country code before the area code and telephone number, your overseas site visitors will get the impression you're not really interested in them. Not giving people the option to provide complete contact information can make a definite difference in whether they complete the form. Be aware also that some form configurations will reject information that is not in the expected format; for example, in many countries, the date is expressed as day/month/year, but U.S.-designed forms may only accept month/day/year. To ensure users are not assaulted by recurring error messages, be sure that forms clearly indicate the preferred date style. Remember too that postal codes in many countries are alphanumeric, so don?t limit forms to a 7- or 10-digit numeral. Another form faux pas is being too restrictive in the ways people can list their education background. A pull-down menu listing conventional American academic degrees will undoubtedly omit credentials recognized in other countries. It's incredibly frustrating for a job prospect to be unable to list his or her educational qualifications. They'll be afraid to leave it blank, so they may simply abandon the form. A recommendation is that pull-down menus of any type include a designation of "other," and provide a text box for users to type additional relevant information. The Recruitsoft.com solution handles the problem neatly by allowing hiring managers in subsidiary countries to write their own job descriptions and desired qualifications, and with the approval of HR, to post them directly on the corporate Web site, and later, remove them. It's a way of decentralizing a centralized process. Any online job application or contact forms should include one vital question: is the applicant legally able to work in the country where the position is based? This is an especially good way to prescreen international applicants for whom an H-1B visa may be required. If the company does not sponsor such workers, they can save their HR staff a lot of time and headaches by filtering up front the applicants unable to immigrate. More sophisticated auto-screening programs could direct those applicants to positions in countries where a work visa would not be required for them. The Language Question Should you include multiple languages on your recruitment pages? That depends on the type of person you want to hire, and how much work you are prepared to do. Using English only on your site can serve as a prequalifier if your hire must be able to read English, but if not, you may want to consider building a "language-friendly" site. Many European countries are doing this well, and they are your competition. It?s rare for American sites, so providing multilingual information could give you an edge. However, that "localizing" sites by language is a huge maintenance undertaking. Every change and addition takes on an exponential quality. You have to be ready for that. Search engines may also need to be modified to accept other languages. If you have a multiple-language site but an English-only search engine, it could seem insensitive. Companies recruiting in the U.K. and Commonwealth countries to make allowances for the Queen's English spellings. Even spellings in Spanish vary from culture to culture. Cultural Nuances Beyond language lie more subtle cultural differences that must be dealt with sensitively on a recruiting site. You have to be able to address cultural "buzzwords". People from different national backgrounds are looking for different things from a job. There are basically about 15 traits -- ranging from child care benefits to profit-sharing -- that people look for in a new position. But candidates from different cultures prioritize them differently, and your Web site should mirror that in the order and manner information is presented. For example, in France, quality of life issues are key, so a French candidate might be attracted to your company if you provide generous vacation time. Japanese workers are attentive to hierarchy, so if you can explicitly indicate a job?s reporting structure, you've hooked them. Depending on which nationalities you hope to appeal to, you can arrange for certain pages to pop up first on your site. Job descriptions should be written with an international audience in mind too, starting with the title. There is some commonality of titles among cultures, but some differences too. Europeans joke that in the U.S., everyone is a "vice president". So be as clear as possible about where the position is on the company totem pole -- who reports to whom -- and make sure that totem pole makes sense. This is especially important in Asian cultures, which base much of their protocol and communications rituals on hierarchical designations. Another strategy for reinforcing the company's cultural awareness is to create an interactive space on your site where interested job hunters can be put in touch with a current employee in a similar position who also shares their cultural background. Offering such a testimonial is extremely powerful, but that company "ambassadors" should be assessed to ensure they are likely to make a positive impression. Let me share some additional tips for creating a multicultural recruiting Web space that works: - Use multilingual search engine tags. Help international candidates find your site by embedding metatags in the languages of people you hope to attract. Consult with a Web designer with translation capabilities to build in keywords like "technology," "jobs," "recruiting," etc. In some cases, you might even need to use software that will enable typing non-Latin alphabets. The world is not operating on Yahoo English, You have to match that movement. - Keep options limited and simple. A site with too many pages and complex navigational selections can make for a nightmarish journey if you?re connected from a slow modem, as many international visitors are. Too many options can also send the wrong message on a cultural level: Americans are conditioned to value choice -- the more the better. Other cultures are turned off by the "more is more" attitude, seeing it instead as pointless excess. - Learn where site visitors are coming from. To enhance your international recruiting efforts, it may be helpful to track where your site visitors are coming from. Implement a pop-up form that compels visitors to click a country box before entering the site, or run an application to capture upper-level domains that indicate the country of ISP origin (.au, .uk, .fr, etc.). You could set the program to bring up a page in French, or proclaiming "Welcome from France" for anyone logging in from a ".fr" domain. The bottom line is that any corporation that hires international professionals should ensure that its Web site acknowledges them in some meaningful way. "Even a subtle international touch can demonstrate you?re more than just another overbloated American site. <Back >		Updates HR Professionals Guide Training & Development Guide Manager's Trouble Shooting Guide Series Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Selling Series HR Management Practises Series Featured Communities BIK & Associated A Premier Training & Management Provider in Training & Development Workshops. PPCSG.Org A Web Forum for the Techno Gadgets Trend Followers. Lots of Informative and Guides for your Pocket PC.
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