FROM AUGUST 2015'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Forget candidate relationship management (CRM) systems and social media — even today’s recruiters fighting the global war for talent sometimes must go back to ground-level basics to pinpoint potential candidates for their clients’ jobs.

While emerging talent markets such as China and India offer millions of people to potentially fill jobs, reaching untapped reserves that live outside the most sophisticated metropolitan areas takes a bespoke approach.

Chong Ng, president, Asia Pacific, Korn/Ferry Futurestep, recently told Recruiter about just such a campaign. “We’re currently working on a programme for a big consumer firm, setting up something for them in the Middle East, and we are to recruit the staff for a plant over there out of Asia,” Ng said. “This is a blue-collar worker solution we’re doing for them to get a couple of hundred blue-collar workers into a ‘green field’ operation.”

To recruit those workers, Ng said: “We will be literally driving from village to village, and approaching the village elders. This obviously is a completely different approach to what we would do here in Europe where we have CRM solutions, and we have social media talent attraction.” 

Cities identified as Tier 1 and Tier 2 are the most sophisticated in terms of the professional skills available and overall business maturity, with Tiers 3 and 4, less so. “If you look at some of the larger economies like India and China, once you get out of four or five major city centres into Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities, you’re in quite rural areas… where the villages are,” Ng explained. 

“Interestingly enough, there is technology, but it’s not laptop-based technology; it’s mobile-based technology. So how you interact with those people, how you reach them becomes a different proposition.” 

Also, the level of talent in those more rural locations is “almost one generation behind what we can get in Tier 1-Tier 2 cities”, Ng conceded. But “clients are accepting” of less sophistication when recruiting for roles there, Ng added, “because it aligns with the market itself; the market is not quite developed”.