6 ways to strengthen your global recruitment strategy

As job openings, applications, and hires soar worldwide, your physical offices no longer dictate your talent pools.

Virtual hiring continues to break down boundaries for talent teams everywhere.

Winning organizations see that strong global recruitment strategies rely on new virtual hiring approaches.

To build or grow a global hiring strategy, you’ll want to understand and learn from unnecessary complexities that halt efficiency:

• Disjointed tools used in various locations
• Friction points that slow time-to-hire
• Decisions made without proper reporting and data
• Lack of trusted data or compliance per territory
• Lack of functionality to compete for talent on a global scale

These best practices will walk you through the ways cloud recruitment software supports your business’ scale without the stress.

6 ways to strengthen your global recruitment strategy

1. Inspire the world’s top talent to join you

The global talent market is vast, but the competition is high. When more employers seek out top talent without location boundaries, it takes more to attract talent for both high-demand and highly specialized roles.

2020 taught us that employer branding, authenticity, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion all have the power to sway a job seeker one way or the other.

Consider the message your career site sends to candidates. As Steve DeCusta of the world’s largest travel luggage company said, “The career pages we were utilizing left candidates searching for information. Our career site is the face of the company; it’s one of the first items candidates interact with and we really needed to set the stage here for why you would want to work with Samsonite.”

Career site best practices that speak directly to any talent audience:

• • Greet visitors with relevant job opportunities based on their search (including recommendations based on skills and keywords)
  • Authentically and clearly communicate company values and mission on screen
  • Harness machine learning of AI recruitment software to boost job posting performance by location
  • Chat in multiple languages and in any time zone
  • Incorporate employee video testimonials

Talent teams are getting creative to reach more potential candidates across multiple locations, without the extra work. Here are some approaches to get your opportunities in front of a big audience.

Best practices that bring personal experiences to a screen:

• • Market personalized or mass-hiring events to targeted talent pools
  • Use text and chat-based outreach to keep engagement rates high
  • Build a repeatable event strategy across many locations and use unique, branded event landing pages each time
  • Offer relevant information to all job seekers, even casual browsers
  • Make the event mobile-friendly to encourage any attendee
  • Connect recruiters, managers, and talent in location-specific 1:1 chats

Social media can be an effective way to attract active and passive candidates. Not only can it showcase your company culture, but paid advertising can target audiences by location to deliver personalized experiences on a global scale. Social sourcing best practices to access global talent from one place:

• • Lean on social networks like LinkedIn to provide an easy and familiar experience for over 722 million users in 200 countries worldwide
  • Automate jobs from your ATS to LinkedIn, so candidates apply directly
  • Gain more insight into best-fit talent through universally used LinkedIn Skills vs. simply looking at a resume that may be formatted differently in different locations

 2. Simplify your high-volume hiring approach

Whether your recruiters are hiring from different offices or seeking out global talent from a single headquarters, consistency is key. Your talent solutions can help you master high-volume hiring while maintaining the elements unique to each location.

For example, international businesses require many different workflows and processes but prioritize standardization. Foot Locker commented on their ability to leverage multiple workflows saying, “We were looking for a global operation that could scale with us and allow us to have consistency across our brand and locations.”

Applicant tracking best practices to improve worldwide efforts with consistency:

• • Create a single source of truth with data flowing in and out of one core system
  • Simplify workflows with bulk actions for common tasks
  • Manage scheduling and communications in local times and languages
  • Configure dashboards by location to provide the right guidance and metrics
  • Maintain candidate profiles to elevate for future job matches in the same location or remote position with relevant skill requirements

Read more: 3 ways to hack your ATS to attract and hire top talent

Offer management best practices that deliver streamlined and compliant offers:

• • Keep offers branded and cohesive across any location
  • Automate tasks and approvals based on the hiring type
  • Build pre-approved templates to ensure accuracy with terms and language
  • Consider and swap clauses based on the hire type and local regulations
  • Add a video message to personalize the offer

Onboarding Software best practices to deliver streamlined and compliant offers:

• • Provide location-specific digital paperwork to complete before day one
  • Confirm compliance is met in any location
  • Maintain accuracy and timeliness with electronic forms and task alerts
  • Personalize the experience with video greetings from the hiring manager and team member

3. Create a consistent candidate experience from anywhere

While it would be nice if job seekers came to your career site and applied right away, we know that multiple touchpoints are needed to stay on their radar.

The top data scientist in San Francisco was likely sought after by other businesses in the area for some time. But now, with location restrictions limited, that same top niche hire may be receiving offers to work remotely for an innovative business in France.

The best way to compete is to create a consistent, branded candidate experience with touchpoints that make talent from anywhere in the world feel a sense of belonging. That’s how U.K.-based TT Electronics saved £170,000 in agency fees. They built an experience that matched applicant expectations across all 27 international locations they hire for.

Candidate relationship management best practices that build international connections:

• • Collect candidate information on your career site and at events
  • Build targeted talent pools by location, hiring type, or skills
  • Automatically surface the best fit candidates from large talent pools using AI
  • Automate branded communications with personalized details
  • Enliven emails with videos of team members sharing their experiences

Recruiting best practices to reach talent where they are, on their time:

• • Modernize your outreach using a universally accepted approach: text
  • Access talent quickly outside of varying business hours
  • Adapt communications to language specifications
  • Track outreach with talent through universally-accessible candidate profiles in your ATS to easily execute data privacy requests

 4. Maintain international compliance

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of global enterprises will invest in a HCM suite for HR, but still source additional tools to meet 20-30% of requirements from other solutions due to gaps in functionality.

That’s a lot of data flowing, and potentially a lot of risk.

Global talent acquisition amplifies compliance concerns. Different countries have different protocols, legislation, and policies to consider. That’s where having an experienced and globally equipped talent solution becomes an integral part of risk mitigation.

Integration best practices to keep data flow accurate and compliant between tools:

• • Integrate hiring tools used to attract, engage, hire, and advance talent under the same talent platform for a single source of truth
  • Partner with vendors with noted international data transfer and privacy standards so your data is secure between all your systems
  • Ensure your tools can meet the GDPR, EU-US Privacy Shield, Swiss-US Privacy Shield, and other applicable data privacy laws
  • Configure your solutions to address varying regulations across different locations
  • Set individual job openings to provide specific compliance questions required by a certain country and add them to future corresponding job templates
  • Keep candidate communications off employees’ personal phones and in a secure, compliant platform

5. Align your C-Suite for maximum ROI

Talent acquisition strategies are undergoing a mandatory transformation fueled by the events of 2020. That transformation has most talent teams searching for more from their talent software, which requires executive buy in.

You’re positioned to impact your business’s future and scale by showing the ROI of partnering or continuing to partner with a vendor who can support you.

Here’s how to get alignment on the global hiring technology your team needs:

• • Align functionality gaps to current and future business goals
  • Use a holistic view of key performance metrics to tie in ROI potential
  • Personalize the value statements for each C-suite member
  • Show progressive multilingual and accessibility capabilities
  • Bring forward the success other employers in your industry
  • Look for a partner who has worked with global employers before and continues to invest in global-scale software that scaling operations require

Read more in the Executive Guide for Evaluating New Technology.

6. Create a truly localized candidate experience

In a world of hyper-personalization, the only thing that’ll cut it when it comes to quality of experience and satisfaction is the feeling that end users’ needs and preferences are uniquely met. While features are the engine of user task execution, content is the essence of user experience. When localization is done right, the notion of a truly native experience becomes possible, allowing international companies to benefit and delight in using SaaS solutions as much as any other company.

Resonate with your audience by speaking their language 

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” – Nelson Mandela. 

Candidates and consumers alike react more positively to brands that speak to them in their language. According to Common Sense Advisory, 85% of consumers won’t make a purchase if information is not readily available in their own language. Considering that the U.S. represents less than 25% of the world’s $88 trillion economies (GWP), it is imperative for international organizations to tailor content and services to diverse languages.

But, multi-language capabilities are important not only for a company’s bottom line but for compliance as well. “Companies going global need to be very mindful of local regulations,” explains Megan Buttita, research director of emerging trends in talent acquisition at IDC. “There are different rules and regulations in each country, and they change frequently. It takes time to learn about the culture, recruit talent, and find trusted partners.” Certain market regulations require that all user-facing content be available in locally spoken languages. One such requirement is “The Quebec Rule,” which mandates: any person or company that sells products or services in Quebec must follow the language requirements of the Charter of the French Language. Furthermore, all workers in Quebec have the right to work in French. Employees can speak and write in French and ask for French work documents and tools, including workplace communications and software. These rules apply to all businesses, no matter how big or small they are. 

Remember that not all candidate experiences are the same 

To successfully market and sell on the global stage, multicultural experiences are no longer a nice-to-have; they are a necessity. With ever more global and diverse markets, identity-driven marketing is critical for businesses to make meaningful connections and resonate with audiences who buy their products or join their workforce. 

Regional hiring practices are a key factor to any company’s global success, as consumers seek (and naturally expect) to see themselves in the businesses they buy from. Thus, international employees with bilingual skills and cross-cultural competencies are uniquely suited to help make authentic connections between international audiences and brands. Global candidate sourcing is the first step to acquire the capability for local resonance anywhere in the world. 

The first step in every global journey is local 

When candidates consider employment opportunities with your business, they’re actually “buying” into your brand. People naturally expect content to be presented to them in their own language when making a buying decision. Employment decisions are no exception. 

Global businesses make enormous investments in multicultural marketing to ensure optimal resonance for their products across diverse customer bases. Likewise, attracting, hiring, and retaining top global candidates requires culturally targeted recruitment and employer branding campaigns distributed across channels and markets. 

Global by design 

Global Accessibility is a key pillar in iCIMS’ commitment to delivering a user experience second-to-none. iCIMS solutions allow every international (i.e., non-English) user to benefit from the unique hiring and candidate management features and capabilities we offer, as much as any of our American (English) users. Our Product Leadership and Customer Success teams work intently to deliver world-class solutions, addressing local and global hiring requirements in a unified and consistent yet localized experience. 

Delivering a truly localized user experience requires diligent execution of several processes, including: 

• • Creating content, workflows, and designs that reflect user preferences and expectations across markets. This includes emails, job postings, and all recruiter/candidate-facing UI elements. 
  • Adapting graphics and themes to conform to varying cultural norms and sensitivities. 
  • Building flexible layout and navigation patterns of website pages to display translated texts properly. 
  • Converting elements to local formats, such as units of measure, calendar dates, and currencies. 
  • Displaying multibyte character sets (MBCSs) and using the right encoding (via UTF-8). 
  • Helping customers to comply with local employment laws and regulations (including GDPR). 

Optimize your global recruiting strategy
 

As borders become less relevant, global companies are in a position to connect even more people with job opportunities across the world. It’s all about having the right partnership to get you there. 

To hear from 12 experts on their global recruiting insights, check out Your Guide to Global Recruiting next.