Talent Acquisition for an Overseas Company expanding in Pakistan’s market.

Background:

Pakistan is one of the emerging markets in global economies, especially considering the One Belt One Road initiative; also referred as CPEC. In recent years, many overseas companies have entered Pakistan, established their setup from the scratch and have experienced immense growth with great market response. As an overseas company, having no presence in Pakistan, it is imperative to understand the local landscape of business industry, culture, market practices and importantly having some insight about your competition. The question arises; how would you attain all such information? Definitely you cannot rely on Internet and Online data all the times, so you need a first hand and structured information. For all this to happen, you need a local market partner or a consultant to provide all the details and insights before you work out a swift roll-out strategy.

Why engage us?

We at (HRBS) HR Business Solutions Pvt Ltd., are the business partner for all your professional Human Resource and business consultancy needs. Our team has radical experience of management consultancy and market intelligence for resolving complex business enigmas. Our professional and experience team provides quick and customized quality solutions based on all your requirements. We mold the traditional HR areas with the new and customized solutions to resolve all your market intelligence and business challenges.

Recruitment, Trainings, Market Intelligence, Cultural transformation, and Management Consultancy are the areas where we consider to be experts.

A recent case of HR Consultancy:

One of China’s leading retail company was to enter Pakistan in last year.  They had presence in many other countries at that time but didn’t had any single staff working in the local market, let alone having an operational retail outlet. Their products were selling like a hot cake in all other markets. They had adopted and expanded into other countries with a global business strategy. At the time of entering in Pakistan, they had their annual targets defined for expanding business locally. However, the HR strategy was yet to be aligned with business goals to support achieving them. The dynamics of Pakistan’s market were much different and the management quickly realized the variances in culture, competition, pay structure, rising inflation, religious sensitivity and many volatile aspects that formulate the entire market dynamics. So, they decided to understand the local market’s landscape first before stepping onto the field.

That is where we; at HRBS, got engaged as  Management Consultants and developed a Market Intelligence report for the client before laying out a comprehensive HR strategy to support business expansion.

Developing and rolling out a successful strategy:

Talent acquisition aspect is one of the most important modules in a HR strategy, especially for a new venture in an overseas environment. In order to attract the best talent from the industry, it is always imperative to offer a market competitive compensation package.

Unlike some developed countries, the pay which you get here at month’s end matters’ more than any other benefits or opportunities the organization is offering. Considering such circumstances and the company’s current status in the country, neither the people knew about its leadership nor about the brand itself. In this regard, our team worked closely with the client management and provided a detailed report on market insights based on salary levels, talent mapping, cultural diversity, key positions, competition analysis and legal aspects. Some of the best practices of leading retail brands were benchmarked and improvise to gain competitive edge.

As a consultant and headhunting partner, we developed a complete Talent Acquisition strategy; based on refining Job descriptions and local market’s dynamics. For any business, the most critical positions are associated with Business Development and Sales departments. All other departments work around them as support team. Without having any business leads and Sales, no company can grow or sustain. So, for this, following questions were addressed to hire quality Business development & Sales Managers:      

1)     From which Companies and Brands, recruitment is to be done?

2)     What compensation to offer along with benefits?

3)     What sources of recruitment to be used?

4)     How to retain the talent?

Our recruitment approach was to target talent working in specific brands from the same industry. This was due to multiple reasons, few among them were to:

• gaining insights of rival brands through this staff, without doing extensive market research
• these resources are familiar with strengths and weaknesses of their current employer
• such talent is well equipped with local industry dynamics
• less training would be required as that talent was already familiar with the work

Once the talent mapping from specific brands was done, a market survey was conducted to provide basis of developing a compensation structure which was integrated with business and talent acquisition strategy. Since client had no presence in the local market and neither among the locals were familiar with it, except a very few who travel a lot overseas, so it was a daring challenge to attract good & qualified talent. Therefore, in order to tempt the best talent, we decided to offer more benefits and salaries than our competition. Coincidentally, with recent rise in inflation & price hikes in the country, it wasn’t much difficult to attract the best talent from the rival brands by offering much better benefits and salaries. Applicant turnover was appeasing and more than what had been expected.

Shortlisting and interviews were done and within a timeframe of one month all eight department head positions were filled. All of them came from direct competition. The best catch was the sourcing channels used in this talent acquisition approach. After placement of top tier’s positions, we developed a reference based program; in which if any staff refers a candidate for any position from relevant industry and rival brands, they would be rewarded with small monetary incentive. Now in a race for getting an incentive, client’s HR team got its hands on quality resumes from industry and built a strong resource pool for future needs.

Key Takeaways:

Once the top tier was hired with a structured approach and methodology, followed by the introduction of internal referral based hiring program, the trickle-down effect of seeking applicants from rival brands came up. Other positions were aligned automatically with the business objectives of hiring from the competition market without spending much further on external recruitment channels.

The purpose of using this approach was to allow the top tier leadership to translate their experience & skills down the line among their subordinates. As they all had come from the competitors, and they understand the market business dynamics better, so the department heads can then mentor, coach and train their teams with the required skill set needed for achieving the company goals.

Lastly, we recommended client to align the incentives of Sales and Business development staff directly proportional to Sale numbers and development of new sale channels. Company went on to not only achieve its annual business targets but also became the fastest growing retail brands in the country. Due to comprehensive background screening of candidates before on-boarding them, there were no major cases of misconduct or forgery.

Based on this work, client recommended us many other overseas firms which were about to expand in Pakistan.