Why isn't recruiting borderless yet?

Never mind what tabloids preach about immigration and nasty foreigners who steal our jobs. The European Union is still a fortress: business may be borderless, but labor practically isn't, bar top positions at multinational companies.

 Although Europeans are largely free to work anywhere they want in the EU, only a tiny proportion actually move abroad. In 2011, just 0.2% of Europeans moved to another European country for professional reasons, while labour mobility in the US amounted to a staggering 2.7%. It's not that they are not keen on emigrating though. A number of surveys show that younger Europeans are more geographically mobile in mind than their parents and most are proficient in the continent's de facto common language, English. On top of that, employers face acute skills shortages due to demographic and educational reasons.

So what's missing from the equation, not just in Europe but globally?

Let's take as an example the hospitality sector, an area where international recruiting is a must, as employers look for employees with international experience and language skills, specially for technical and managerial positions. They often need to hire in a hurry, in time for the upcoming season. Here's what Shota Chichua, Director of Finance at Marco Polo Hotel Gudauri, has to say about his employer's recent recruiting needs: ''I needed a specialized and high-quality candidate for a general manager opening, so we decided to attract the best person from abroad''.

I work for Movinhand, a recruiting platform that goes a long way towards helping people like Shota. Our platform allows employers to attract talent across borders for their hotel, restaurant and hospitality job vacancies by taking care of everything, from plane tickets to visas. Our clients are everywhere, from Aberdeen, Scotland, to the Peloponnese in Greece and from the sunny beaches of Dubai to the snowy slopes of the Caucasus.

Shota's hiring problems are our bread and butter. However, our experience shows that international recruiting will only be hassle-free and therefore commonplace  under certain conditions. 

First, there needs to be a meticulous and ongoing curation process, creating coherent talent pools with transferable, comparable and measurable skills from which employers can choose from. To do so, HR managers, recruiters and recruiting platforms need to first gain deep insights into their talent pipelines through HR analytics, algorithms and plain old screening techniques. This is becoming easier to do with technology, but it still requires a lot of hard work.

Building trust is key to a successful customer experience. This is all the more important in international hiring, an experience fraught with unpredictability and frustrated expectations. We have seen that an increasing number of employers would hire someone who is willing to travel half the globe to come their way, provided that they have some proof of the candidate’s potential, drive and experience. Shota provides an example of this emerging pattern in the way forward-looking employers think: ''Happy to say that tomorrow I am welcoming our new interim general manager, a Dutch senior executive coming from the Caribbean to Georgia! Needless to say, all the next senior hires will be through the Movinhand platform.''

Second, we need to streamline some of the cumbersome procedures involved in hiring from abroad. There is not much effort to disrupt relocation, despite the recent surge in the number of people travelling for business or leisure. In a recent article, The Economist states that instead of simplifying their visa processes, governments are complicating them while offloading work to private contractors who, in turn, have little incentive to streamline anything.

We think that relocation will be an integral part of the recruiting process in the future. Helping candidates to book flights, insurance and above all accommodation will be a rising trend in the industry. Gone are the days where your local talent pool was sufficient in quantity and quality to accommodate the accelerating shifts in your recruiting needs. We have also seen that recruiters who keep in touch with globally mobile workers on an ongoing basis and help them in every step of their career have to gain the most.

Here's what Shota thinks about our approach:''This is the first time I have access to an authentically curated pool of candidates and receive such a direct and personalized approach through active assistance by the Movinhand customer success team.'

So recruiters may consider providing advanced mobility, relocation and immigration services to job seekers and employers. The working holiday visa scheme in particular is very promising for employers who need to hire international talent for a limited period of time.

This is what we call a 'holistic' approach to international recruiting. We believe that recruiters need to depart from the traditional notion of hiring as an activity that simply aims to spot and source candidates. This will not work when hiring from abroad.

Gaining a deep understanding of a global talent pool, curating it into a coherent community and streamlining its relocation needs is certainly no easy task. Of course it is early days to know whether borderless recruiting at a massive scale is arriving. But employers do seem to approve. So let's give the final word to one of them, in this case Shota: ''Such a disruptive way to enter the recruiting industry! Way to go!''