Feature

Cultural sensitivity in overseas hiring

Cross-cultural factors play a significant role while recruiting abroad. Sudipta Dev analyses the mistakes that hiring managers often make

Hiring the right people is a tough task, particularly when they are located thousands of miles away. As Indian companies go global, they focus on recruiting local talent for their overseas operations. The first challenge of possessing a global workforce are the cross-cultural issues that come up right at the hiring stage itself. Selectors need to be trained in and sensitised to the nuances of a candidate’s culture. These differences must be taken into account while recruiting an individual. Many a times good candidates are rejected only because of unaware hiring managers and lack of effective communication between the two.

"It is important to sell the company. A good professional practice is to send the details regarding the organisation and the job role upfront" - Milind Jadhav Senior Vice-President, HR Patni

Hiring managers need to understand during overseas recruitment that the candidates do not know much about the company or the country and view the same according to the image portrayed by the recruiter. “It is important to sell the company. A good professional practice is to send the details regarding the organisation and the job role upfront. Sometimes the candidate does not even know who is going to interview him,” says Milind Jadhav, Senior Vice-president, HR, Patni.

"Often businesses go into cross-cultural recruitment as if it is just a bigger project than a domestic recruitment campaign" - Stephen IP Martin CEO ITAP International

When recruiting people from other nations, organisations need to be aware that national culture influences the behaviour and thinking at a fundamental level. “It impacts the ways we solve problems, our preferences for group or individual expression, assumptions and expectations of our organisation, bosses and subordinates, our need for information and flexibility in making judgements, need for business relationships or focus on tasks, even the ways we deal with time,” states Stephen IP Martin, CEO, ITAP International and Managing Director, Kimball Consulting, UK. The company advises global corporations on how to deal with cross-cultural issues.

Common mistakes

Organisations often make the mistake of replicating the hiring process of their own country while they are selecting candidates from different nations. “Often businesses go into cross-cultural recruitment as if it is just a bigger project than a domestic recruitment campaign. It is obvious though that a recruitment and selection process that is designed for a mono-cultural home market recruitment may be very effective at identifying the skills, attitudes, behaviours and competencies of candidates who are ‘like us’—and eliminating those who are not,” says Martin, adding that if some companies think that there is nothing wrong with that then they should stay local. The whole point of going international is to recruit staff that can operate on the international stage and can bring diverse capabilities to the business, educate and broaden the organisation so that it can think and act effectively against international competition.

Martin asserts that at the basic level, if the interviewers are only comfortable with candidates who make good eye contact, are very up-beat about their own personal achievements, who will put their own view forward even when it challenges that of the interviewer, then they will feel uncomfortable and probably not select candidates from about half the world’s population. “At a higher level, if the competencies model that the business relies on is of the ‘universal’ type, i.e. one that applies limited cultural perspectives (often a US-influenced / home-culture mix) on a global stage, then it will identify as ‘the best’ only those that fit that limited view.”

It is important for organisations to invest in training hiring managers on cross-cultural aspects. “We are very sensitive to this issue and focus on ‘hosting’ people. How you treat them and talk to them moulds their image,” says Jadhav. Patni’s training programme for hiring managers enables them to do their job effectively.

The precautions

An organisation has to be extra cautious while hiring overseas, ranging from selecting the right headhunter to proper background checks of the candidates (which incidentally happens to be a tough job). Ashish Arora, CEO, SearchWorks points out that companies should also refrain from getting over-awed with applicants from a developed country or under-rate applicants from a developing nation.

There other factors that an organisation needs to be cautious about. Martin lists a few:

• Take steps to educate the organisation’s decision makers on the impact of national culture on the business
• Ensure that competencies are ‘behaviourally diverse’
• Design a process that recognises the validity and value of capability that is different from our own—and train selectors to find it and see it when it is sitting in front of them

The “cultural fit” factor

It is a two-way street for both the organisation and the new hire. In fact, problems of assimilation can be solved at the recruiting stage if the issue is clearly communicated to the candidate. An individual working for an Indian IT major or an American MNC in the US will find a lot of difference while working for the same company in India. The need is therefore to acquaint them well with the cultural differences in the working environment. At Patni, there is a well-structured induction training programme for non-Indian inductees, including sensitisation to Indian aspects. Furthermore, senior non-Indian professionals are invited to India. “They are told what to expect and what not to expect. For many of them landing in Mumbai is itself a cultural shock,” acknowledges Jadhav. He adds that European and American offices are quite places while in India it is a fun place. This is alien to them. Also, Indians work longer hours and take more breaks than their European or Japanese counterparts.

The major cross-cultural issues at the workplace, according to Shebu Raphael, Head, Human Capital Worldwide, Marlabs, are the following:

• Work unit (in some cultures, the team is valued more than the individual)
• Performance issues (some cultures prefer NOT to give direct performance related feedback)
• Language barriers due to different cultures
• Selected candidate may not have a global mindset

Raphael however feels that these issues can be addressed at the recruitment/ induction stage by identifying the right candidate who has a global mindset and is tolerant of changes, by being candid on the cultural requirements of the job and planning a defined and measured induction plan for assimilation.

The major concern for organisations, believes Martin, is to ensure that they can get the best out of their expensive professional staff—by opening their organisation to the reality that best practice in one culture can be wholly counter-productive in another. “Multi-cultural companies can be fantastically productive and effective—provided the organisation itself is equi-pped to understand and utilise the range of capabilities that multi-cultural staff can bring.”

ec@expresscomputeronline.com