What’s the state of play in the current hiring market?

I can never resist a deep dive into hiring trends. No matter a company’s size, style, or sector, finding talent is a core component of business — and these days, a bit volatile.

What’s the state of play in the current hiring market? What’s the influence of international recruiting? I ran these questions and more by Jonathan Romley, one of the world's foremost experts on global talent management and the future of work, on a recent bonus episode of the Business of Tech.

As the author of Winning the Global Talent War, How to Find the World's Best Employees and Thrive in a Competitive World and the founder of Lundy, a global talent firm specializing in cross-border talent, Romley’s insight is something we can benefit from. Here’s what we got into.

What’s behind the hiring tension?

We began our conversion with the basics: what’s Romley’s sense of the state of play for the hiring market right now?

Big or small, the companies coming to Romley are primarily concerned about operational efficiency. Businesses that aren’t growing are struggling to deliver the same quality of service to customers and absorb rising salary costs. Although a steady state is a good place to be, realistically, they want to spend the same or less amount of money on payroll.

I asked Romley to help me reconcile the fact that unemployment in the U.S. is down, there’s a labor shortage, and yet, companies still get waves and waves of applications. What dynamic is causing that tension that people can’t see?

Turns out, there are rumblings of a second great resignation on the horizon. The first one revolved around the ‘quiet quitting’ conversation, but Romley described this second wave as people being interested in new opportunities yet held back by the fear that they won’t be able to find a job – essentially, poor consumer sentiment.

For businesses, this means receiving tons of applications from people who may not even be qualified for the role. AI may be bolstering this issue by helping folks apply to a lot of jobs quite quickly:

“Recruitment leaders in companies big and small are thinking about, how do we frankly defend ourselves against what are not fraudulent, but embellished applications? It creates a lot more work for everybody. And in the end, well, I think that you still have to find that needle in a haystack – that haystack is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” he said.

Reducing risk while expanding your talent pool

Fraudulent actors taking advantage of hiring seem to be entering the conversation more and more; I just recently covered a story about a person in North Korea successfully getting a remote job in the States.

So, as someone leaning into international recruiting to expand the talent pool, how is Romley building processes that both reach the right people and protect companies from bad actors?

Counterintuitively, Romley’s first recommendation for everyone is to not post a job anywhere at all. None of the strategies he shares with clients (and in his book) involve posting jobs.

“As a company trying to hire, you’d be better off trying to find 3 or 4 people that fit your exact profile, and do that through being proactive and going out and finding talent. Go out there and find them and engage. And then you get what you want. It ends up being a lot less work than trying to sort through a pile of 1000 resumes, even if it's a virtual one,” he said.

How Romley sources international talent

I like the premise, but what does that actually entail? I asked Romley to explain that proactive process a bit more.

First, his team tries to understand on a deeper level: what are the characteristics you’re actually looking for? He sees this as an opportunity to really dig deep down into everything that's not in a job description.

To answer that, one of the first questions Romley asks someone who’s hiring is a bit provocative: why would anyone want to work here? In his words:

“It's not yourself that you're trying to convince. It's someone else.”

Other questions during this stage might include: what are the characteristics of this person that are not in the job description? What's the team like? Who are they going to work with? What's the manager like? How do they approach the work as a team together?

Logistics also plays a huge role here. Although we live in a global village, you have to consider what it’s like to work with someone from another part of the world. How are they going to fit into your team scheduling-wise?

Then, it’s time to start having conversations with people who are a close fit to who you’re looking for.

To filter that down, Romley says LinkedIn is a great place to start – to a certain extent. The platform is popular in the US and Western Europe, but there are still countries where a high representation of finance talent, for example, isn’t typically on LinkedIn. In that case, you have to identify where talent lives online in those countries.

There’s a great resource Romley recommends for this: the Recruiting Brain Food Big List of Places to Post Jobs. Using that, you’ll be able to search for people on local job sites all over the world.

Romley suggests approaching this process like you would sales. Who can we sell this job to? Where are they? What do they care about? And how are we going to convince them to come on board?

Untapped markets worth exploring

Are there interesting markets or regions Romley believes have unique, untapped talent?

To answer this, Romley explained that there are many preconceptions about where talent comes from that aren’t necessarily worth listening to. For example, many think of India as the go-to country for outsourcing. But if you try the Indian market, you’ll be competing with the same countries you already compete with against the US, and you’ll still have to pay increasingly high wages.

Instead, Romely says the answer depends on the responsibilities of the role, the style of the tech stack, and the communication and management style.

Many American companies gravitate toward Latin America because of the similar time zones. Argentina is an opportunity to reach untapped talent, but you also risk currency issues.

Many European companies are looking into Albania and other Balkan countries, as well as Georgia – but there’s some political risk there.

For both American and European companies valuing population and scalability, Romley sees African countries as a lucrative market – as long as you can deal with the time change. Most outsourcing companies in Europe are specifically building out operations in Egypt, according to Romley.

Circling back to time change, Romley says to return to the ‘why would anyone want to work with you’ query. If an international candidate is comparing offers, and one requires them to stay up all night in their time zone, you may miss out on talent. But if you’re looking for round-the-clock support, looking somewhere with time zones opposite to yours could be a hiring win-win.

Feeling inspired to explore international hiring? Romley’s book Winning the Global Talent War, How to Find the World's Best Employees and Thrive in a Competitive World has more information.

As always, my inbox is open for stories, questions, reactions, or whatever else is on your mind.