Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+

OpinionGlobal HR

Don’t pay over the odds for staff in new markets

by Personnel Today 10 May 2005
by Personnel Today 10 May 2005

Wage dynamics in emergent markets still amaze me.

I was in Mumbai recently, conducting interviews for two senior roles there. During my visit, I saw a number of candidates, all of whom were well-qualified for the roles we were seeking to fill.

These were candidates for senior roles, with a good 10-plus years in their functional discipline behind them. They brought credible experience to the table, and could clearly hit the ground running. They came from brand-name companies, including Indian, European and US firms.

Education levels were impressive.

Perhaps what struck me the most, though, was the expectation on pay packages.

Candidate after candidate would clearly spell out their current remuneration, and then stun me with expectations of 40% to 50% uplifts in base pay. Tellingly, these were usually the same candidates who averaged 18 to 24 months per employer.

I’m a capitalist – I really am. I believe in free markets and supply/demand cycles. Having lived in China in the late 1990s, though, I’m also painfully familiar with opportunistic job hunters and the Western firms that fuel them.

When we (HR professionals wandering about in new markets) start looking for talent, we quickly become our own worst enemies. We are obsessed with finding skills and experiences like our own. In our home markets, we would never agree pay rises like this; we’d wait until we found the correct intersection of skills, experience and cost.

We have no-one to blame but ourselves for the vicious wage spirals we’re seeing in a number of sub-markets.

Go look for skilled IT folk in Indonesia; do a search for an HR person in India (not personnel admin, but real HR); wander into Ulan Baator to find your next chief financial officer.

Sure, there’s a supply/demand equation in place, and you have to deal with it, but there’s also a basic requirement to exercise a bit of discipline in recruitment and job offers.

Recruiting outside your home market is always challenging. It’s essential that you do your homework and understand current market conditions. Have you researched wage practices? Do you understand availability, or lack thereof, of key skillsets?

As you work through your recruiting process, are you keeping a close watch on your ‘must haves’ rather than your ‘nice to haves’? Are you being realistic, or have you picked up a headquarters’ competency model and forced it to fit onto a very different business culture?

We, as HR leaders for our firms, have a responsibility to understand the markets we operate in. Then we have an obligation to set and manage expectations with our senior leadership. Only from instilling this discipline into our organisations can we make a true difference for our businesses.

Denouement? I found excellent candidates for both of my roles in Mumbai, and made two hiring decisions. I paid appropriate market wages, and both candidates are looking forward to coming on board. And neither of them sought 40%-plus increases.

Lance Richards is senior director of international HR for Kelly Services and adviser to SHRM



Personnel Today
Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

previous post
Sainsbury’s slashes banking jobs
next post
Women promoted to senior posts in HR department shake-up at Asda

You may also like

Should you let your employees work from abroad?

2 Aug 2022

Netherlands on track to approve working from home...

7 Jul 2022

Brexit remains an ‘open wound’ for EU employees...

23 Jun 2022

Workforce wellbeing and job design: Stephen Bevan talks...

17 Jun 2022

UK among worst in Europe for employee engagement

14 Jun 2022

The outdated views of the anti-hybrid working brigade

9 Jun 2022

Davos 2022: ‘Invest in social jobs to save...

27 May 2022

Davos hears that ‘wages can rise’ without creating...

26 May 2022

‘It’s International HR Day – wait, you didn’t...

20 May 2022

Bald move: Tribunal was right in sex-related harassment...

17 May 2022
  • 6 reasons why work-based learning is better than traditional training PROMOTED | A recent Fortune/Deloitte survey found that 71% of CEOs are anticipating that this year’s biggest business disrupter...Read more
  • Strengthening Scotland’s public services through virtual recruiting PROMOTED | This website is Scotland's go-to place for job seekers looking to apply for roles in public services...Read more
  • What’s next for L&D? Enter Alchemist… PROMOTED | It’s time to turn off the tedious and get ready for interactive and immersive learning experiences...Read more
  • Simple mistakes are blighting the onboarding experience PROMOTED | The onboarding of new hires is a company’s best chance...Read more
  • Preventing Burnout: How can HR help key workers get the right help? PROMOTED | Workplace wellbeing may seem a distant memory...Read more

Personnel Today Jobs
 

Search Jobs

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2022

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2022 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
    • Advertise
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Equality, diversity and inclusion
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • XpertHR
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Pricing
    • Free trial
    • Subscribe
    • XpertHR USA
  • Webinars
  • OHW+