At Cisco, Many Top Recruits Are Already on the Payroll

Cisco Systems has been quietly doubling up on its recruiting efforts, but with a twist: the target market is made up of the company’s own employees. In particular, it has been making it easier for employees to get promoted into different departments, rather than first moving laterally from one division to another and then getting promoted.

This all began in November of 2008 when people like then-staffing-chief and now Chief Learning Officer Don McLaughlin, the HR SVP Brian Schipper, and others realized it really needed to keep the talent it had as the company grew in areas like virtual healthcare and smart grids. In January 2009, Heather Yurko, Amy Buck, and a 30-person team of others in Cisco — from the compensation, staffing, operations, and other departments — ran a prototype test. If all went well, the program, called TalentConnect, would expand.

It went well, and it did.

Over and Up

Essentially what traditionally went on at Cisco was that to get a Cisco promotion, you had to move horizontally first, from one department to another. With the new plan, you could move two steps at once — to a different division, and up. Cisco had to change its way of thinking to make this happen, Yurko says, taking into account skills and experience more than knowledge of a given area.

She gives the example of Cisco’s technology group, which was where this 2009 pilot was done. If a program manager job was open in the technology department, instead of seeing which program managers were available, what Cisco would do under this pilot program is analyze what skills it would take to do the job well: working with multiple clients, for example, as well as balancing priorities, and having a passion for great customer service. Perhaps an account manager in a different division has these skills, and could move into the technology group, and up into this manager role, all in one fell swoop.

The initial pilot worked. From March through May 2009, nearly 80 percent of positions were filled by internal candidates, and the time to fill a position dropped by an average of 22 days. Satisfaction in the program ran high.

Yurko, who works out of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, acted as a program manager, and Buck, working remotely from the Sierras in California, the executive sponsor. The 30-person team dissolved, and born later was what I’d call an “HR R&D group.” Cisco calls it a Staffing Innovation Organization; Buck is the senior director. Formed in July of 2009, it got the green light from HR leaders to move full speed ahead with expanded testing of the recruit-and-retain employees program.

Going Global

Turnover at Cisco runs somewhere around 5%. But the company has been watching various studies (from Deloitte, for example) showing that large numbers of employees will start looking for new jobs as the economy picks up steam. It also learned in a 2009 internal survey that 36% of employees did not know of additional opportunities within the company. It wanted to change the mindset at Cisco into one that Yurko calls an “open marketplace of opportunity.”

So this year Cisco ran a new and bigger pilot, from January to August of this year, using employees in the operations and finance departments globally, as well as some of the European sales staff. A lot had to be done, and tinkered with along the way, according to Yurko. Compensation had to rewrite policies. Employee engagement folks needed to alter their mindset and their messages — basically, the employee value proposition. Relocation policies needed to change also.

Cisco’s back-end system that manages employee resume-type information, from ADP, had to be modified (such as adding fields and new metrics to use in evaluating the program). Employees use the system to complete profiles and opt-in to receiving inquiries about internal jobs.

A big part of what has been happening, however, at Cisco, has been softer. It’s less about policies, and more about change. “A lot of active, ongoing, change management, organizational adoption training,” Yurko says.

Recruiters were and are encouraged to actively source Cisco’s employees. The Staffing Innovation Organization and others in recruiting and staffing and human resources have been talking to recruiters and managers about why this is important, why it’s in the long-term interests of the company. Yurko says the message is: “You may need someone to do a job, but you’re hiring someone for Cisco, not just your team.” She says that “moving from the concept of ‘my talent’ to ‘Cisco talent’ — we know this will be ongoing, for years.”

Anyhow, this 2010 pilot was deemed another success, like the one in 2009. But this summer HR leaders suggested that rolling it out to all employees needed to wait a few months, as a ton seemed to be happening at once at Cisco, from performance management to management training initiatives.

The program was launched worldwide this September, to all 70,000 employees (the exception being that if you’ve been on the job less than a year, you’re not yet eligible). The Staffing Innovation Organization now has 11 members, three added over the last couple of months. The TalentConnect program was mentioned briefly in the company’s corporate responsibility report. And after two months of this September’s launch, 33% of all internal positions were being filled by recruiters actively sourcing employees, as opposed to people applying directly to the role. Employee satisfaction with the recruiting process is on the rise.

New Tool Ranks Job Listings Using Social Media Data

Employee referrals and social media were already merging more quickly than Brangelina. A new tool from Bernard Hodes aims to make referrals and social media more tightly knit, and more personalized.

Hodes started thinking about all this at the end of 2008, going into the beginning of 2009. It has spent the last three months developing a tool companies could put on their corporate career sites, giving job candidates a personal suggestion of the jobs that might be best for them.

Here’s how it works.

A job candidate goes to a company’s career site — or, perhaps its intranet if they’re looking for an internal job.

As you see in the graphic at left (click to enlarge), a candidate can choose to log in to that career site using their Facebook or LinkedIn logins. An algorithm developed by Hodes is used to examine the candidate’s current job, past jobs, skills, and so on, and recommend jobs on the company’s career site that fit the job-seeker.

At that point, the candidate can click on one of the job titles to learn more about the job, getting an expanded description.

Also — see graphic at the right bottom, and again, click to enlarge — they get a list of their connections and the jobs that would best fit for those people they’re connected to on social media sites. The candidate can click on a button to refer a job to a friend.

Kane Cochran, the director of digital innovation at Hodes, says that while a number of companies have built widgets for the use of social media in employee referrals, this is the first to marry career sites, social media, and referrals in a personal way, delivering jobs from a career site to employees based on their history and skills. 

I told Cochran I was skeptical about how this would work with Facebook; Facebook profiles, I said, have a lot less job information than LinkedIn profiles. That, he says, is changing, with more people putting more employment-related histories on Facebook.

While the tool is now available to all, Hodes will first focus on selling the tool to clients who currently use its IQ system, as well as clients who use its recruitment advertising services, and then broaden its sales out to non-clients.

What’s Hot in IT

As Yahoo prepares to lay people off, it’s looking like at least the techies in that crowd will find a slightly improving job market. New surveys, one from Dice and the other from TEKsystems, indicate that it’s getting a little tougher to fill technical jobs.

Let’s start with what Dice says.

Of nearly 850 HR managers and recruiters who hire IT employees, 46% say it’s taking longer to fill jobs than last year, with only 18% say it’s taking a shorter time. The most-often reason given for the longer time is the inability to find qualified people; in June, in comparison, the main reason was just caution about the economy.

The folks that Dice surveyed say these jobs and skills are their top hiring priorities for 2011:

• Java/J2EE developer
• .Net developer
• Software developer
• Project manager
• Mobile developer
• Web developer
• SAP
• Business analyst
• Business intelligence
• Security analyst

On to the TEKsystems survey of IT directors and other IT executives, which found that “while 30% of IT leaders indicate confidence in their ability to compete for talent as we emerge from the recession, most (70%) do not feel very prepared.”

Here are the jobs TEKsystems found are the most difficult to fill with “exceptional talent,” as judged by the percentage of respondents rating the difficulty a seven or above on a 1- 10 scale.

Enterprise Architect:67%

Security specialist: 54%

Network architect: 52%

Business intelligence specialist: 52%

Database administrator: 50%

Virtualization engineer 46%

.Net architect: 45%

ERP technology functional analyst: 45%

Java/J2EE architect: 43%

CRM technology functional analyst: 43%

Business process engineer: 43%

Network engineer: 39%

Project manager: 38%

Storage engineer: 35%

Systems administrator: 25%

Technical writer: 21%

Help desk/desktop support: 10%

What an Improving Job Market Means to Recruiters

A talented group of corporate recruiting leaders and others talk about what the expanding economy and improving job market mean to recruiters; how recruiting departments are changing; how contract work and RPOs are being used, and why many employees now bitterly resent their employers.

Among those on the podcast:

• Amit Pal Singh, the operations director at Labor Finders, a large staffing firm with about 200,000 customers
• Erin Peterson, the former VP of global talent acquisition at Hewitt, now leader of the RPO business at Aon Hewitt
• Indrajit Sen (from India), a recruiting/HR leader at Aricent and past ERE Recruiting Excellence Award recipient
• Carrie Corbin, a talent-attraction strategist at AT&T
• Jenifer Lambert, a big-biller recruiter and founder of Talentum

New Sourcing Tool Will Show Supply of Talent

In about two weeks, Wanted Technologies will beta-launch a new service for employers to estimate how many potential job candidates there are in a given job, in a given area. It’s hoping recruiters will find the tool valuable when talking to hiring managers, particularly in instances when recruiters need to explain why a given search is so difficult.

First, let me explain the type of data Wanted Technologies now offers. It splices and dices employment data a few different ways, and offers it to third-party recruiters looking to see which corporate recruiting departments are hiring, as well as to sales departments for them to get leads. An example is captured in the graphic on the right, showing sales jobs in Pittsburgh, grouped by employer, pulled from job boards.

Now what Wanted Technologies is planning on doing is taking its historical data, and packaging it so that it can be used as a sourcing tool.

As the (click-to-enlarge) graphic below shows, let’s say you wanted to see how many accounting/finance managers there are in Boston, in the finance/insurance industry, and you wanted to use the keyword “risk” to narrow down their experience.

Wanted Technologies will use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show:

• There are about 2.4 million people working in Boston;
• About 102,000 of those are in finance/accounting;
• 15,920 of those are managers;
• About 25%, or 3,835, of those are in the finance/insurance industry.

That’s the easy part. That’s the government data, getting us down to 3,835 finance/accounting managers in Boston financial industry companies.

Here’s where the Wanted Technologies estimate comes in. Based on the historical data of Wanted Technologies’ last five years of job postings, it finds that 46% of the listings in that city, field, industry, and function, involve “risk.” It extrapolates — assuming that 46% of the 3,835 involve “risk.” With that, it estimates that about 1,775 people are available for you to choose from in Boston — 46% of 3,835.

Murray says this new tool is meant to give general supply-demand information: you can look at roughly how many people are in a given job, then look at how many employers are looking for the same thing you’re looking for, thus getting an idea how hard a search is going to be. Later, for the next version of this product, Murray says a red-yellow-green sign will be used to show how difficult a search is going to be.

Wanted’s current clients, like Robert Half and Kelly Services, will get the new product for free as an add-on to what they’re getting now. They pay $100 per seat per month. Murray hopes to sell new seats to the recruiters at companies like Robert Half and Kelly  – as opposed to who’s using Wanted Technologies data now, which in many cases is business development people. Murray also helps to sell to corporate recruiting departments; particularly, as mentioned earlier, as a way for recruiters to “raise their credibility” and better explain how hard or easy it’s going to be to fill a job.

Some of the many companies in similar businesses include EmployOn, My Perfect Gig, and LinkedIn. Murray envisions recruiters using his new tool in combination with LinkedIn; Wanted Technologies first to see the numbers of people potentially available, LinkedIn to drill down. “If you find it’s going to be too hard to fill the job in Boston, then you may want to go to Springfield, Hartford, or somewhere else,” he says.

Experts Predict Slow Growth but Competitive Recruiting in 2011

Slow growth, hesitancy, and nervousness will continue into 2011, but the competition for employees will continue to be vigorous for many positions.

That’s the upshot of what a panel of recruiting leaders, consultants, and professors are saying. Their detailed advice for corporate recruiting leaders will be in the December Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

For now, some highlights:

“Finding people in the right place with the right skills will not necessarily be easier in this over-saturated labor market. In fact, it may be more difficult.”  –John A. Challenger, Challenger, Gray & Christmas chief executive officer

Jeff Joerres

“While there is a sense of stabilization growing, don’t be fooled–now is the time to implement a robust talent strategy that fully accelerates an organization’s business strategy. Those who think short-term instead of looking at the bigger picture will find themselves talent-poor thanks to external forces and the velocity of change. Having the best business strategy in the world is purely academic if the company lacks the talent it needs to execute it…2011 promises to be an exciting year. 2010 was an improvement on 2009, and that upward gradient will continue. It has been a long uphill struggle and as we trudge on through the fog of uncertainty, it can feel as if the summit is not getting any closer. If we glance over our shoulder though, and see how far we have come since the beginning of the climb, we cannot fail to be filled with renewed confidence that the peak will be scaled and we can look forward to the fun part of the race where it is all downhill.”  –Jeffrey A. Joerres, Manpower Chairman and CEO

“Is all the economic news bad? Not by a long shot. Although the economy will be lurching forth, and there will be bouts of short-term bad news, we will not be back in the horrible markets of half a million job losses monthly. The 2011 economy should be decidedly better than that of 2008-09. Productivity is up, but firms cannot live on productivity gains forever. They will have to hire as output, albeit slowly, expands. Firms that start their recruitment the earliest will have their pick of the best and the brightest. Those firms will get not only talent, but also grateful team members.”  –Jack Worrall, Rutgers professor of economics and chair, College of Arts and Sciences

“The American labor market is digging out from a deep hole, and doing so at a snail’s pace, for two very fundamental reasons. The first reason is that there isn’t enough demand to warrant adding more people. And if that were the only problem, the solution would be simple: Jumpstart demand. In other words, government should spend enough money to get demand growing again. But the second argument suggests even if there were another round of stimulus spending, it wouldn’t work. This is because the workers needed to produce the goods and services in demand just aren’t out there. This is the mismatch between the skills the unemployed have and the skills required to fill new jobs.”  –Ken Goldstein, Conference Board economist

“Why hasn’t a lower-cost model for executive search emerged? In 1980, if I had engaged a search firm to conduct a retained search, the fee would have been 33-1/3%. Today, the percentage is exactly the same (or at least that’s the starting point for negotiation). Since the world is now flat, access to information costs almost nothing compared to 30 years ago. Every other industry has gone through cathartic change. So why does the search industry stay the same?”  –Erin M. Peterson, Aon Hewitt recruitment process outsourcing leader

Lorrie Lykins

“All bets will be off as we move in earnest into a post-recession economy. We can expect to see unprecedented hiring skirmishes between rivals and all-out coups as the war for talent heats up again. And potential candidates will be less passive in their job search approaches and negotiating as the pace of hiring quickens. While online resources will continuously offer employers new and innovative ways to connect with these potential candidates, the good old-fashioned art of schmoozing and networking will be more critical than ever.”  –Lorrie Lykins, i4cp (Institute for Corporate Productivity) managing editor

“Many candidates have a residual cynicism from the way they were treated during the recession. While poor candidate treatment by companies is nothing new, a person’s experience during difficult times tends to be magnified to them as opposed to when times are good. As a result, people remember how they were treated over the last couple of years, and I’ve seen employer brands suffer. I suspect companies will continue to try to rehabilitate their personal brands through improved candidate care…”  –Jeremy Eskenazi, Riviera Advisors managing principal

Sherrie Madia

“You will find stellar candidates who are not plugged in to social media. But will you need stellar candidates who know their way around the Web 2.0 space as social media continues to evolve across all areas of organizations. By integrating social media strategies into recruitment, research, and overall corporate impact, you will not only find you can make more informed and effective hires, but you will also reinvent your own corporate culture.”  –Sherrie A. Madia, Wharton lecturer

“It’s now time to engage all employees and create meaning that makes money. Recruiters need to stop worrying simply about their company’s survival, and start creating reasons why it should.”  –Dave Ulrich, Michigan professor of business

Susan Burns

“The competition for flexible ‘project talent’ will increase as organizations seek to achieve workforce strategies that are sustainable and adapt quickly and easily to shifting business needs. The influence of social technologies, ease of access to networks, and desire to connect has made talent a shared global resource. Keeping talent engaged and interested in your brand and business is not going to get easier.” –Susan Burns, Talent Synchronicity chief talent strategist

Intel Planning Next Steps With Social Media Recruiting

Intel is trying to tie together a sprawling network of social media recruiting efforts to achieve more consistency, get more recruiters involved in social media, and have more of a conversation and less one-way communication. In addition to making sure it’s getting the messages out to the candidates it wants, Intel’s recruiting strategists also want to make sure they keep up with competitors like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intuit.

Watch for all of the following out of Intel in the year to come:

• Intel will have a digital marketing team working on retrofitting Intel’s content for mobile devices in 2011, including the whole process of searching for and applying for a job.
• Sejal Patel, recruitment marketing project manager, will be working on consolidating and revamping the company’s Facebook pages in 2011. Right now, Intel has a main company page; a more career-focused page called Discover Intel; and pages for some countries such as Vietnam. Patel would like Intel’s jobs to be fed automatically to some of these pages. Right now, not a lot of Intel jobs are posted on Facebook; Keith Molesworth, channels and ERP manager, says Facebook is “more of a conversation” right now.
• Better search engine optimization. Intel looked at using Jobs2Web but has yet to do so. (Generally — though it’s doing a pilot with an employee-referral vendor – it has chosen to do a lot of its social media recruiting toolmaking in-house, partly for financial reasons, partly over concerns its org chart, email addresses, and other sensitive information could get out, and partly because of its own expertise.) Anyhow, it’s rethinking how it names things; “Discover Intel” for example, doesn’t ring a search engine’s bell like something worded more about careers.
• Improving coordination. Right now, the different owners of the Intel social media initiatives don’t communicate as seamlessly as the company wants. A job candidate may, for example, ask a question on one site, and may not be directed to a conversation going on about that topic on another Intel recruiting page, simply because the Intel managers running the channels aren’t aware of all that’s going on. Intel could turn to a tool like ObjectiveMarketer.
• Simply better using social media. Marketing and Branding Program Manager Allen Stephens says that “95% of our work is broadcasting, and 5% engaging.” He says Intel wants to make sure the community aspects of social media recruiting aren’t ignored. He also says that some Intel recruiters are “really good” at social media recruiting, while others are barely aware of all the many channels the company’s using. When Intel needs to ramp up in a certain area and for a certain job function, he wants the company to have data already in hand showing what channels will work best. To that end, Intel’s thinking about identifying “social media ambassadors” so that the manufacturing team, or software team, has 1-2 recruiters “up to speed in all social channels we have out there, engaging in a consistent way,” Stephens says.

All this is not to say that social media recruiting is new to Intel; on the contrary, what it’s trying to is get a better grip on all the chip giant is doing. Intel has vigorously hired social media marketing experts on its marketing team. It offers something called “Digital IQ” training to become an expert in social media and be listed in an internal database of social media practitioners at the firm. It has videos on YouTube; a Jobs page and a careers site; a main Twitter page and recruiter Twitter pages, social media guidelines; an external blog as well as the “Planet Blue” blog used internally; and a LinkedIn page.

Speaking of LinkedIn: Keith Molesworth says the site has been a “great success” for global recruiting, while some “global job boards,” he says, have touted themselves as global but tend to be weak in this region or that region. “LinkedIn is one of the few products out of the gate that seems to be successful globally,” he says. Intel is talking with LinkedIn about Referral Engine.

Stephens says that Intel’s “corporate career site is still our destination.” But, he says, “We’re primarily trying to attract engineers who are passive candidates. They don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to check out the Intel.com site and look for career opportunities.’ They might be on LinkedIn and they might be on Facebook and they might be on Twitter.”

Ditto, says Tiffany Peery. She’s is an engineering recruiter who’s now the U.S. College Virtual Recruiting and Marketing Program Manager, and says it’s the passive engineering candidate Intel aims most for.

Teresa Chiappone is the web architect who handles a lot of the back-end Intel metrics. She makes sure that a job listing — on Twitter, for example — has a source code on it. That way, if a job seeker clicks on it and applies for a job, Intel can track it.

But, I asked her, “Doesn’t a candidate usually see a job on Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and then go online later to the career site to apply?”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” she says. But, she acknowledges, “it’s a fine art. It’s not perfect.”

Over the course of a couple of decades at Intel, she has seen the company jump on email quickly, and on the Internet quickly, and on social media quickly. “We’ve always been a very open communications kind of company,” she says. “This is just the next step in the evolution.”

A few Brief ERE Expo Take-aways

At the closing session today in Florida, ERE Expo attendees mentioned some of their key take-aways, suggestions, and other thoughts from the last three days:

• College recruiting programs should be much more social-media-oriented, with fewer on-campus interviews involving large numbers of people who may not fit the company’s culture and needs anyhow
• Recruiters should get more objective feedback and much less subjective feedback. Record recruiter voice mails to assess telephone skills.
• Use internal employees’ networks and contacts more, and encourage them to spread the word of your company through their networks. This may sound both common sense and commonplace, one participant said, but recruiters think this is happening more than it is.
• From the panel of college students: remember that this is a business of people. Again, this isn’t a novel idea, but it’s easy to forget when so much of recruiting is electronic.
• Explore video interviewing options (a Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership article on this topic is in the works)
• LinkedIn, while valuable and wildly popular, isn’t universally used by college students
• When recruiters text people at all hours of the day (9 p.m. on Monday night, for example), that’s an indication people at the company have a work/life that’s out of balance
• Social responsibility is highly desired by some students looking for jobs, and perhaps need to be highlighted more on corporate career sites
• Recruiters should be as transparent as possible and share with their peers their tools and techniques — not just what they did but how they did it and what they used to get it done. Also, recruiters should share with their peers both what didn’t work and what did work.
• Search engine optimization is effective in sourcing for nurses, as is the website Indeed.com
• Remind employees of how they came to a job and a career in the first place. Employees who enter healthcare, teaching, and other professions often do so because of a passion, and as the passion fades amidst their day-to-day work, it can help to reinforce the connection of their job to people’s lives.
• Onboarding doesn’t have to be expensive to be done well, or at least better than the status quo at many companies

Diverse, Talented, Tech-Savvy: Welcome to the new U.S. Military

Want to hire someone who’s led a team, managed a huge project, saved lives, mastered technology, learned to handle pressure, and dealt with adversity, all by age 23?

Navy veteran Ted Daywalt, of the job board VetJobs, suggests you employ a veteran and that you don’t stick them in a menial job way below their worth.

What’s Important to Employees — Around the World

Don’t expect your American recruiting methods like email blasts to work smoothly in other countries.

That’s the message from two experienced global recruiters today at the ERE Expo in Florida: Raghav Singh, a familiar ERE author who has helped staff organizations in Switzerland, Japan, China, India, and elsewhere, and Kim Rutledge, a Dell recruiting leader turned consultant who has managed Latin American recruiting.

Singh notes the following from a recent Towers-Watson Survey:

• In the U.S. and the UK, a competitive salary is the most sought-after quality in a job.
• Germans list “challenging work” as most important to them in a job.
• Career advancement is the top goal of job-seekers in Brazil, India, and China.
• A convenient work location is a big lure in Germany and the UK; less so in the U.S. and UK.

Rutledge has strong relationships in Brazil. She notes that the types of email blasts that work in the U.S. probably won’t work there, as the country is more relationship-oriented, and referrals are even more effective than they are in the U.S. “It’s a very face-to-face culture,” she says. LinkedIn is nice, but for Brazilians the online relationships generally won’t last as long as the U.S. before it’s best to move it to a more personal conversation.

Rutledge says English-speaking skills are weaker in Brazil than in many other South American countries, and it’s best to use Portuguese-speaking recruiters. Hierarchies are important in Brazil. “It’s very much top-down,” Rutledge says. “They go up their chain for what are sometimes paternalistic concerns, in my very North American mind.”

In Brazil, relocating people isn’t as easy as Americans might think it is. What seems like a simple move from one city to another may be thought of by an employee as a Manhattan-to-Oklahoma sort of move from one subculture to another.

She also talked about Panama. Labor costs there are very low; it reminds her of India, where the educational system and government infrastructure could be better, but the country is very attractive to Nike, HP, Dell, some banks, and other companies with call centers and other operations. Rutledge says the Panamian market favors very “old-school” recruiting. Online recruiting lags behind Brazil and the U.S. The postal system is weak; in fact, some people don’t even get regular mail the way Americans know it, if they don’t pay for it.

“The appetite for career growth in Panama is unbelievable,” she says. Companies are more interested in a company than expertise in a field; someone might move from human resources to a very different department rather than move from one HR job to another.

In Mexico, Rutledge has found that security concerns make it more difficult to find information about people. Also, Mexico City has a formal culture where people are often much more dressed up than an American tourist might think if their view of Mexico is what they’ve seen are the flip-flops found in a beach town. She had to watch how she communicated when in Mexico City because the more formal relationships, where trust builds a little more slowly than perhaps in the U.S., took more nurturing.

Mexico’s a country where a mobile recruiting campaign can work. The challenge is finding the right names of people to contact; for that she says you’ll want to rely more on local databases than on big global sources such as Monster.

“Brands rule” in India, Singh says. It’s a lot harder to get quality people if you’re not a big-company, whether a big Western name or a big Indian multinational like Infosys. If you lack a big brand, he says, “you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back.” As Singh has said before, there’s a myth that India offers a bottomless pit of talent. In reality, there aren’t as many great colleges as there are in the U.S., and someone who calls themselves an “engineer” may be defining the word in a wide variety of ways.

The difference in income between companies is huge in India, he adds, with big, well-known and well-respected companies offering a big premium.

Resume fraud is “rampant” in India, he adds. Of course, resumes are notorious for exaggerations, but “not to the extent” you’ll find in India, he says. Some top schools even embed a chip in their diplomas to prove they’re the real thing.

Chinese-language skills are a must for recruiting in China, he says. Even people who speak English often have a weaker command of the language than businesspeople in many other countries. Also, you need to be “extremely explicit” to candidates in China about what to expect on the job.

Job descriptions shouldn’t leave out something an employee will end up doing, as they’ll end up quite surprised their expectations weren’t met. Singh said sales job descriptions can be challenging; engineering descriptions less so.

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