One of the pandemic’s legacies is the opening of genuinely global markets for talent. The trend of moving work to people, rather than people to work, is set to grow as effectively tapping into international talent pools can offer a huge competitive advantage for the employers that get it right. At the same time, though, recruiting globally can be daunting, with companies having to negotiate the previously unfamiliar cultural, financial, and legal complexities.
My guest this week is Jonathan Romley, founder and CEO of Lundy. Jonathan shares his extensive experience in mapping out international hiring plans and highlights why he sees the globalization of talent as a huge strategic opportunity for talent acquisition.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The shifting global workforce landscape
• Why global hiring is a strategic opportunity for Talent Acquisition
• Understanding the business case
• Assessing whether a role should be based in another country
• Strategy roles versus execution roles
• The vital importance of research
• The disruptive force of AI
• Trust and the candidate experience
• What will TA look like in five years time?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters enables hiring without boundaries by freeing talent acquisition teams from legacy applicant tracking software. Smart Recruiters next generation platform serves as a hiring operating system for over 4,000 customers like Bosch, LinkedIn, Skechers and Visa. Companies with business critical hiring needs turn to Smart Recruiters for best of breed functionality, world class support and a robust ecosystem of third party applications and service providers. To find out more go to smartrecruiters.com that’s smartrecruiters.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:03]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 652 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. One of the legacies of the pandemic is the opening up of genuinely global markets for talent. The trend of moving work to people rather than people to work is set to grow as effectively tapping into global talent pools can offer a huge competitive advantage for the employers that get it right with companies having to negotiate previously unfamiliar cultural, financial and legal complexities. My guest this week is Jonathan Romley, founder and CEO of Lundy. Jonathan shares his extensive experience in mapping out international hiring plans and highlights why he sees the globalization of talent as a huge strategic opportunity for talent acquisition. Hi Jonathan, and welcome to the podcast. Hey Matt, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jonathan Romley [00:02:06]:
Sure. Well, hello, I’m Jonathan Romley and I’ve. I’ve founded companies on three continents, lived in, I don’t know, seven countries, speak half a dozen languages. But I guess that’s not exactly what we’re here to talk about today. I’m the founder and CEO of a company called Lundy and Lundy is a global talent firm that helps companies to map out their international hiring plans. So that’s before we start any recruitment and also provides local recruiters in more than 70 countries.
Matt Alder [00:02:36]:
Now, a lot has changed about the world of work in the last few years contextualize all this for us in terms of what’s going on and what are the kind of significant shifts that you’ve seen in the global workforce landscape.
Jonathan Romley [00:02:49]:
I think that the biggest shift that we’ve seen in the last five years, well, of course the first one is remote. But setting that aside for a moment, I think that the second biggest shift that we’ve seen is the shift from moving people to work to moving work to people. And I think that remote has enabled this trend. Now what does that mean? You know, you might have been a company in London and for a lower cost, hired in Scotland, for example, which is, you know, anyway in the UK still. Or you might have been a company in California that started hiring in Texas to reduce your cost. But remote work. Well, there’s, there’s a saying, it goes something like, you know, what can be done remotely in Boston can be done remotely in Bangalore. I’m not suggesting you do it in Bangalore, by the way. I’d prefer to say Buenos Aires, but. Okay, fine. And this is, this is really a big shift, right. So, you know, there are still companies that are hiring remotely, but only in their country because. Well, it seems complicated even now for, for many companies, this idea of, of going abroad. And many companies are, I mean, we even faced one client that was relocating people from really all over the place, all over the world to work remotely in their country. Wow. Because they didn’t want to get involved in all of the, you know, the payroll tax rates are this in this country and the personal income tax rates are in this kind of, you know, everything is different everywhere, of course. And so their solution was, I think it’s going to be easier if we just fly everybody here and they can work remotely from enter the, anywhere they want in this country. But at least then, you know, we know how to manage labor laws, we know how to manage equipment delivery and maintenance. You know, we know how to do this remote. But yeah, doing that internationally, doing it all over the place seems like a big challenge. This is a simple sort of concept, but it is a really big shift. And it, and it, and it has created while some friction in the hiring market with candidates. Right. You might be competing now for a job with somebody in another country. You know, the truth is, you were before, but the conditions were less obvious maybe. Right. We were always competing with an international alternative, but, but now it’s, it’s just too easy for most companies or it’s easier than it has been ever before to take advantage of this. The world is becoming borderless. I mean, as much as, as much as we’re building walls in, in some places, the world is becoming increasingly borderless. And I think this is the biggest shift that we’ve seen in the last, well, five years. Definitely one of the biggest shifts.
Matt Alder [00:06:03]:
No, absolutely. And there are obviously lots of practicalities to this. But before maybe we talk about some of those, lots of talent acquisition professionals. Talent acquisition leaders listening. Why is this a strategic opportunity for them to add value to their business? How can they sort of think of it in those kind of terms.
Jonathan Romley [00:06:23]:
I think the TA needs to become an asset in this process for the business. So too often, almost every time that we hear from a TA leader or a member of a TA team in a large company, they tend to get involved when what to hire, who to hire, the budget, everything is sort of done and dusted. And this presents a big execution risk for the business. So I’m just handing to the T18 or to TA leadership. Okay, great, great news. Great news. TA team, we are opening an office in Mexico City. Mexico City. We’re going to open an office in Mexico City. And what I need you to do, TA team, is I need you to hire 60 people who speak Korean for minimum wage. This is not a problem that you want to fall into your lap. Now, how can we prevent that? Right? Because somewhere in the business, somebody made this decision, and likely they’ve made this decision based on a number of, well, they will think that they are relevant factors most of the time, right? They’ll think, oh, yeah, we really, we really did our research. We heard that there’s a big Korean community in Mexico City. I don’t know, just as an example. Right. So we’ve really done our research on this. Well, the opportunity for the TA team here is really to get a seat at the table. And you can do that. I mean, this is already, I think, not the first time somebody said TA needs to have a seat at the table. And I think that increasingly TA leadership does have a seat at the table when these kind of decisions are being made. But if you have a seat at the table and you have nothing to add, you might as well go back to your office or sign off a zoom because you’re just going to get handed this wreck anyway and be stuck with it. And I think that the strategic opportunity for TA is, is. Is to have some amount of knowledge. Now you can choose how much is relevant and in what industry your company is in and what the trends are. And, you know, what makes sense, but is to become an asset in the organization when. When these decisions. Not when these decisions are being made, but when. When they’re being considered. When someone says, hey, you know, the business case here is that the cost of. The cost of talent acquisition is too high. Okay, I’ll give you another. The business case, right? Like we’re having challenges to hire engineering team members or that our professional services team costs are too high based on the margin that we’re able to get based on what we can charge to clients. You know, there’s Some stress in the markets or operational efficiency. Operational efficiency is a, is a, is two very loaded words just now in the moment. Right? But, but you want, you want to be able to add value there and to say, hey, well, what is the goal? Okay, the goal is to reduce the cost. Great. Where could we go to reduce the cost? But before, because that’s where everybody goes, everybody goes straight from what, what is the business case? To where are we going to hire? But there’s a step in, in the middle, right? And it’s, it’s not where are we going to hire. In fact, it’s okay, we know, we know what the business case is. We want to reduce costs. Where could we go? Where could we go? And in order to, to, to determine where could we go, we need more than the business case. We need some background on the team. We need some especially where is the team located that they’re going to work with. We need some information about what kind of work are the people going to do. Does this even belong in another country? Now, there are things that may and there are things that may not. I think that strategy type roles generally belong as close to the customer or the business as they can be versus the technical execution role. And I don’t mean necessarily engineering. You could be doing accounting, right, but the execution can be done somewhere else. So you really have to think, does this belong in another country at all? And if it does, what are the constraints? What are the time constraints? What are the budget constraints? What’s going to make this a win for the leadership team and the organization? And where else is this data going to come from except from the TA team? Right, because otherwise you’ve got leaders that are Google searching or just using their own bias, right? Like the idea that engineers come from Eastern Europe and call centers come from the Philippines to make business decisions. And who else but TA in the organization, well, to become the knowledge center for this information. I mean, of course the alternative is that you could pay my company to give it to you, but you know, that’s also not scalable.
Matt Alder [00:11:31]:
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Jonathan Romley [00:11:35]:
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Matt Alder [00:12:02]:
Let’s talk about some of the, the practicalities of this. So what are the key elements of this type of recruitment strategy? What are the common of pitfalls? How can people set Themselves up for success.
Jonathan Romley [00:12:15]:
The first and most important one here is research and why research? Well, you ought not to try where you’re doomed to fail and where the data tells the story that you’re doomed to fail. I’m all for testing and trying and failing, but if it’s like really obvious, if it’s very, very obvious. So I can give you an example. We were just yesterday talking to. Well, and I certainly won’t name the company but, but, but a very large defense company in, in Europe. And well, they were considering hiring in a, in a pretty small country, some, some, some technical type team members and well, their, their salaries that they were proposing in their country which are according to the salary bands in their organization, you know, tens of thousands of employees, this company. So not a lot of flexibility were lower than where they wanted to hire from number one. And number two, there were maybe 300 people at all in the country they wanted to hire from that had anything that even approximated to the job description to the job title and they wanted the people to relocate. So like if you put all those things together, you know, probably you could try, right? We can hire one person anywhere. I think that we can hire one person anywhere. But that’s not what they were trying to do. They were trying to build a team of dozens of people. Let’s be realistic. You’re not going to take 6 or 7% of a labor market out and move it to another country for a lower salary. And they understood that. But this is why the, the research step is so important. And when they came to us, they had gone pretty far down that path. They were sure that that’s the place that they needed to do it from. And they had already gotten buy in from the business that strategically that this was a good location for the business to source the talents. And so research is really, really important here before you start, you know, any, any kind of process and research should in my opinion must include sourcing exercises. Right? So can we even find what we’re looking for? And that also includes a demand exercise which is to look for similar jobs on the market. So that’s great that there might be 10,000 people that approximate to this job title or job description. But you know, if there are 7,000 jobs posted, you’re, you’re, you’re not going to have an easy time. It doesn’t matter what country it is unless you want to go into the market and pay 2x which I mean is not really what anybody wants to do and certainly unlikely that it’s what Your budget in the business is going to support. So research, very important. But let’s say we get past that point and we are, we are, we are locked on a market. The data supports our thesis that we can hire here and that it scales one, two, three years out. Right. Because maybe we need to hire one today, but we need a thousand over three years. And very often we also see companies touch down, do a remote hub in some market and then realize after employee 100 that it’s like really, really exponentially more difficult to get employee 101 and then you have to go do another remote hub. So anyway, yeah, research, research. But once you get to that point where you say, okay, this is what we’re going to do and we believe, at least based on the data, the evidence that we have today, that this is going to scale within the next three years, four years, we can support dislocation. Well then we need to localize everything. And localization is not translation. It’s not Google Translate, it’s not ChatGPT, it’s the job title. And I mean look, we’re working in ta, so I’m not surprised, if you will already know, that job titles can be different in different countries. Particularly when we’re talking about jobs that are not technical. So setting aside any kind of technology related roles where there is some common terms and languages used all over the world, when we get outside of that world into the real world where most of us are working, um, well, job titles can be very, very different. And the same job title may exist, but it might mean, you know, something different. I was, I was years ago, I mean just a story from Lundy. We were hiring SDRs which are like a junior sales team member. No disrespect to SDRs, but it’s like an entry level job into the sales team. And we were working with, we were working with an agency, won’t say their name, big one in Poland, global agency. And well, they were sending us like management board level employees for sales development. You know, they felt like business development leader. I mean another example in the uk, you know, marketing executive does not mean the head of the marketing department. Things like this that may be non obvious. Even when you go to the UK and you’re an American company or you’re a company in the UK and you go to America. Even though the words and the language are the same, well the job title still might be different. So once we get past job title in a job, well, job description, job description also might look a lot different depending on, well, how much demand there is in the market. You know what, what it looks like in terms of competition from other employers. So in some countries the candidate would like to see a job description that really very, very clearly and in much detail explains daily tasks, KPIs objectives and in other markets, job description should look like a Google advertisement, right? A couple, couple of bullet points. Because you want people to apply or you don’t just want to scare anybody away when you send it to them because the job market is so tight and believe it or not, you know, we don’t have one global job market. The job market is different in the UK as different in Poland, it’s different in, you know, Brazil, it’s different in the US and it also, of course we already know, depends on who you’re hiring, what you’re hiring for. So, well, it might need to be a lot different and it might need to be the same. So you really want to get help, get some local help on, on this. Because other things like benefits, employment model, if we want to access maximum talent pool, right? So if we talk about the idea of like a market opportunity in a business, right, I want to have access to all of the potential market opportunity. If we want to have access to all of the potential candidates in the market, then we need to understand what kind of benefits and what kind of employment model. And what I mean by that is, is this a market where the professionals that we’re hiring prefer to be employed as full time employees? By the way, this is like usually the case pretty much all over the world or in some niche areas like tech, some employees, depending on their salary level and in some countries their age, Social Security, tax, family status might prefer a different kind of employment model that may be more tax advantageous to them. So for example, if we take a country like Ukraine where technology professionals have a reduced personal income tax rate, it’s I don’t know, 5, 6%, something like this. But they must be employed B2B. They must be employed corp to corp, basically and they’re registered as a business, but as a sole trader. And this is the most popular way even over a certain salary level in Poland, for example, also. Right? So we want to understand that and we want to be sure that what we’re offering, because for example, in Poland if I took a senior person and that’s just a senior person, it doesn’t matter what their role is, if their salary is over, let’s say, let’s say €4,000amonth, they would probably like to be employed in a B2B type model because it’s like more tax advantageous for them. They end up keep more of their money. You have to know this about the market because if you go to market with the wrong benefits, with the wrong employment model, people will not engage and you’ll look like, you know, green. You’ll look like you don’t understand. And from a candidate experience perspective, do I want to work for an employer that doesn’t understand like the labor laws or let’s say not even labor laws, but like employment norms from my position in the country where I am. So if you want to access the whole entire labor market, need to be sure that you’re offering conditions that are equal or better to a local employer. Now how do you find out what a local employer is offering? Well, okay, I mean we can look at job ads, but you know, not in every country, in every place do you need to list it salary or benefits or conditions or things like this. So you probably need to get some local help or at least use someone in your organization that speaks the language and knows the market. Right. So at least at a bare minimum, someone who’s able to dive in without using Google Translate in their web browser or you know, asking AI, what is the answer to the question that, that knows the market and even if they’ve been out of the market for a while. Right. A lot of Polish people in the uk, if, if you, if they’re able to get up to speed fast enough, then, then that’s at least okay enough to start with. But we want to be sure that we’re communicating with candidates. By the way, you know, LinkedIn is not the most popular platform in the world everywhere, particularly depending on what roles you’re trying to hire from. So even sourcing locations can vary. And this is kind of that point where you have to talk to somebody in marketing. You can try to guess, you can try to look at the brain through big list of places to post jobs or something like that. But in reality, eventually you’re going to have to talk to somebody where you want to do this. And that doesn’t mean that you’re going to hire them to be a recruiter, but you need to at least spend some time and get some feedback just to make sure that you’re aligned. This is going to really set you up for the highest probability of success. Of course, nothing is for certain, but, well, if we want to de risk, these are the key ways to de risk an international recruitment process.
Matt Alder [00:23:34]:
Fantastic. You mentioned AI there. AI is obviously a very disruptive Force in the workplace at the moment, what role is it playing in sort of shaping the markets that you work in and the kind of things that you do?
Jonathan Romley [00:23:46]:
Well, I think it’s impossible not to talk about AI. It feels like it’s another episode, Matt. But I think that the sourcing is probably the most at risk. Right. And I think that there are a lot of tools out there that are saying, hey, press this button and in five seconds I’m going to build you a sourcing list of candidates that are relevant to this job description. I mean, if we talk about the TA side of the equation, and of course we can make a chatbot that speaks Portuguese to screen talent, but if you don’t have any humans that can follow on. If we’re talking about an international recruitment process, if I use AI tools to source candidates and initiate some kind of initial engagement with those candidates, what happens in the step where I don’t have somebody that can give them a conversation in their language for the next step, even if the job requires English? Right. By the way, that’s just a note. Even if you’re hiring people that speak English, you should recruit them in their own language and of course, you know, check their English somewhere in the process. But anyway, I think that you have to make sure that the candidate experience flows right. That we don’t just have a. Well, we talked to somebody in this language and we identified the town in this way. And then suddenly there’s like a flip. It’s a little bit of a bait and switch. By the way. Hi, we’re in Manchester, so I think, I think trust is really important if you’re making your first hire in. In a new place. Think about the. From the candidate perspective. You’re a company in, I don’t know, France, and you want to hire somebody for whatever reason in Colombia. You have no employees in Colombia. You have no legal entity in Colombia. You know, nobody in Colombia knows about you. Even maybe if you’re like a big company with tens of thousands of employees, Colombia might not know about you. Right. You know, cheese comes from France. Great. You must be the cheese brand. I don’t know. So I think that it’s really important to be transparent with making your first hires in a new market. Because trust is so important. And I don’t know, I have a low confidence level of, let’s say, like the transparency in applying AI in the earliest stages of recruitment. I think that you need to get your first hires into place in the new market, and I’d get it right before trying to automate anything. I think, of course there’s a lot of opportunities for automation that are out there right now. But I think that before applying any of that to this process, you first, just like we look, we know the talent acquisition process now, we understand how our team works, we understand how the organization works, and we understand what candidate experience, you know, recruitment processes look like. So we can, we can automate people, pieces of that, that’s fine. But if you’re doing this for the first time, do not try to do it in an automated way. Like do it first, figure out how it works, identify where there are opportunities for optimization for automation and well, yeah, get it right and then definitely, sure, automate.
Matt Alder [00:27:14]:
So a final question for you. Things are obviously developing very quickly at the moment. What do you think the world of work is going to look like in say, five years time?
Jonathan Romley [00:27:25]:
There’s a lot of talk now about the changing role of TA in an organization. And what I truly hope for is a world where TA leadership and certainly the TA team members are not seen as expendable, flexible resources that we scale up and down as needed. It’s not internal rpo. I’d like to see TA team headcount steady state in organizations. And I think that automation can play a role ultimately in preserving what that steady state is. So I’ll go out on a limb here and say I actually think that automation plays a role in preserving jobs, but preserving the headcount of a team, that’s right sized to the organization. And when we have those spikes in hiring, it doesn’t require us to go out to the market and create new T18 members because everybody gets sad when they lose their job and goes to find something else to do. I think that, you know, right, sizing the team based on our understanding of what demand can be is kind of the new, the new normal. And using AI tools to cover those spikes, but maintaining a team, you know, not being replaced by AI, I think we’ll see companies go really hard, I mean, even further than they have on AI before finding the balance kind of between cream and sugar in their coffee or in this case, humans and machines. I also think that we’ll continue to see borders not be a barrier to work. And this is the thing that I’m excited the most about because for most people, moving for economic opportunity actually sucks.
Matt Alder [00:29:12]:
Jonathan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jonathan Romley [00:29:15]:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:29:17]:
My thanks to Jonathan. You can follow this podcast on Apple, Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
