Recruiting Turf Wars: Is the Recruitment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World)

by Michael VanDervort on October 9, 2009

Over There:  Recruit­ing in New Zealand

For this week’s view from “Over There”, we get to hear about some ideas on recruit­ing from David Talamelli, a recruit­ing pro­fes­sional for Ora­cle based in New Zealand.  David also blogs about work­ing at Ora­cle.   In this post, David shares some thoughts on recruit­ing around the world.

Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World)

New Zealand Turf

New Zealand Turf

It can be easy in life to some­times think that the grass is greener on the other side. This can be any­thing from where you live, what role you are in, the tech­nol­ogy available…the list can be end­less. It is human nature for our minds to won­der and think of what things can be like on the other side of the fence. Yes, there are times that things actu­ally are bet­ter else­where, how­ever for the most part after hav­ing a look, what we often find is that is not often the case. In my time in Recruit­ment I have spo­ken to a num­ber of Recruiters locally in ANZ who think that the Recruit­ment Func­tion over­seas is far more advanced than it is actu­ally may be. Many times I have spo­ken to Recruiters in ANZ who think that we as an indus­try locally are a few years behind in the way recruit­ment takes place in com­par­i­son to other loca­tions like North Amer­ica or EMEA.

Good Recruiters Suc­ceed Anywhere

For the most part I dis­agree with state­ments like these, a good Recruiter will be suc­cess­ful regard­less of the loca­tion they work.

I can how­ever appre­ci­ate that local cul­tural dif­fer­ences can play a part. I think this line of think­ing comes from the fact that many of the tools we now use tend to come from ‘hotspots’ like US West Coast or UK, etc.… Before social net­work­ing was all the rage many social net­works were being cre­ated and used by early adopters in the US. For exam­ple (and this is a gen­er­al­i­sa­tion), I do think that the uptake of social net­work­ing tools occurs faster and is more engrained in the US than in com­par­i­son to Aus­tralia. In the US from what I have seen peo­ple are gen­er­ally more open to shar­ing their infor­ma­tion on pub­lic forums than peo­ple are locally in Aus­tralia. I think in Aus­tralia peo­ple tend to be more reserved when send­ing their resumes to com­pa­nies or more cau­tious about set­ting up pub­lic profiles.

I remem­ber when I first set up my LinkedIn account about 4 years ago. In 2006, LinkedIn pro­vided me with a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage as many Recruiters locally were not using LinkedIn at all. It was being used by many Recruiters in the US but not in Aus­tralia. I think this is because LinkedIn’s early adopters were pre­dom­i­nantly based in the US. As the social net­work has expanded over the past 3–4 years it has become used more in other countries. Fast for­ward to 2009 and every Recruiter glob­ally has a pro­file on LinkedIn (as a side note — I fear LinkedIn is going to become over­run with Recruiters and many can­di­dates may lose inter­est in it as a tool, due to all the white noise).

I think that there are good and bad Recruiters every­where - loca­tion does not make a per­son successful. As I have blogged about pre­vi­ously I do believe that in Recruit­ment that Cus­tomer Ser­vice is King. We may do things dif­fer­ently across the globe but one uni­ver­sal rule that I think applies regard­less of loca­tion is that if you can not treat your clients and can­di­dates with a supe­rior level of cus­tomer ser­vice, you will always come in sec­ond place. I could put together a num­ber of quotes of what makes a Recruiter suc­cess­ful, but like any­thing in life you only get out of some­thing what you put in. You can not be suc­cess­ful if you are afraid to pick up the phone and make your cold calls or if you think that can­di­dates will mag­i­cally fall into your lap — it does not mat­ter where you are or what tools you have avail­able, hard work and deter­mi­na­tion are what counts.

About the Blogger

David Talamelli is a Prin­ci­pal Recruiter for Ora­cle Cor­po­ra­tion in the APAC Region and is based in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. David is respon­si­ble for end to end recruit­ment for Ora­cle across Aus­tralia and New Zealand with expo­sure across other APAC coun­tries.  He has been with Ora­cle in their APAC Recruit­ment Divi­sion since early 2006. David has 10+ years IT Recruit­ment expe­ri­ence with pre­vi­ous roles onsite at Hewlett-Packard and also at GAP IT Con­sult­ing. David has cre­ated and run Oracle’s Global Recruit­ment Blog (http://blogs.oracle.com/jobsatoracle). This blog is instru­men­tal in Oracle’s Web 2.0 Recruit­ment Strat­egy and has grown to over 1600+ sub­scribers in the last 12 months

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Technorati
  • Google Bookmarks
  • del.icio.us
  • Diigo
  • email
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Ping.fm
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Blogosphere News
  • LinkaGoGo
  • LinkArena

Related Posts:

{ 2 trackbacks }

Tweets that mention Recruiting Turf Wars: Is the Recruitment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World) -- Topsy.com
October 12, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Have You Been Over There Yet?
October 16, 2009 at 2:44 pm

{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Michael VanDervort October 9, 2009 at 7:23 am

[New Post] Recruit­ing Turf Wars http://toast.tw/1001a9

Reply   More from author

2 Michael VanDervort October 9, 2009 at 7:26 am

new Post: Is the recruit­ing grass really greener on the other side of the world? http://bit.ly/rU1xh

Reply   More from author

3 Michael VanDervort October 9, 2009 at 7:27 am

@DavidTamelli Your post from “Over There”: Is the recruit­ing grass really greener on the other side of the world? http://bit.ly/rU1xh

Reply   More from author

4 Michael VanDervort October 9, 2009 at 1:15 pm

RT @BillBoorman: post from “Over There”: Is the recruit­ing grass really greener on the other side of the world? http://bit.ly/rU1xh

Reply   More from author

5 DavidTalamelli October 9, 2009 at 5:34 pm

RT @MikeVanDervort: RT @BillBoorman post from AU: Is the recruit­ing grass really greener on the other side of the world? http://bit.ly/rU1xh

Reply   More from author

6 DavidTalamelli October 9, 2009 at 9:41 pm

@MikeVanDervort Hi Mike, I just had a look at http://bit.ly/rU1xh — looks good, thanks for the oppor­tu­nity to share this post on your site

Reply   More from author

7 Ron Nieman October 12, 2009 at 2:37 pm

David, thanks for your arti­cle and com­ments. I agree that the key to being a good recruiter is to put in the effort that is required — from cold call­ing to pro­vid­ing the best pos­si­ble can­di­dates avail­able and all that falls in between. Hav­ing lived in Asia and done busi­ness inter­na­tion­ally for 15 years (before open­ing my SRA office), I can attest to the fact that the largest dif­fer­ences around the globe are really just a mat­ter of cul­ture. On the busi­ness front, every­one by-in-large wants to suc­ceed in what­ever endeavor they choose to pur­sue. On a sim­plis­tic level, regional dif­fer­ences means that as a recruiter you may have to make some adjust­ments to the kinds of ques­tions asked, the way you ask them, or in the order in which they are asked.

The world is get­ting flat­ter day by day and as such, its harder to keep those secrets on why we are so go good at what we do…oh well…back to cold calling.

Reply   More from author

8 inTalent Consulting October 12, 2009 at 2:04 pm

Are recruiters in other parts of the world bet­ter? Not if they can’t man­age their stake­hold­ers: http://tinyurl.com/yzpdvgx

Reply   More from author

9 Michael VanDervort October 12, 2009 at 4:23 pm

RT @tweetmeme Recruit­ing Turf Wars: Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World) http://bit.ly/D75il

Reply   More from author

10 anita santiago October 12, 2009 at 4:37 pm

RT @MikeVanDervort: RT @tweetmeme Recruit­ing Turf Wars: Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side http://bit.ly/D75il

Reply   More from author

11 Donna White October 12, 2009 at 4:53 pm

Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World) ~ http://bit.ly/4h3Dwp (via @smartbriefjobs)

Reply   More from author

12 Tara Kachaturoff October 12, 2009 at 6:20 pm

Recruit­ing Turf Wars: Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of the World) http://ow.ly/tZOY

Reply   More from author

13 Dannuroo October 13, 2009 at 6:09 pm

@DavidTalamelli nice mate http://bit.ly/4h3Dwp

Reply   More from author

14 Recruitment 2.0 APAC October 13, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Based in NZ? Has NZ acquired Aus­tralia? RT @Dannuroo: @DavidTalamelli nice mate http://bit.ly/4h3Dwp

Reply   More from author

15 Michael VanDervort October 23, 2009 at 7:18 pm

RT @mikevandervort RT @tweetmeme Recruit­ing Turf Wars: Is the Recruit­ment Grass Really Greener On The Other Side (of http://bit.ly/D75il

Reply   More from author

16 Michael VanDervort October 23, 2009 at 11:18 pm

RT @recruitment2 Based in NZ? Has NZ acquired Aus­tralia? RT @Dannuroo: @DavidTalamelli nice mate http://bit.ly/4h3Dwp

Reply   More from author

17 Nahiaali December 7, 2009 at 5:04 am

Thanks for nice infor­ma­tion update.

Reply   More from author

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

CommentLuv Enabled

Additional comments powered by BackType

Previous post:

Next post:

Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes