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

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)

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

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Tagged as: david talamelli, Human Resources, LinkedIn, new zealand, oracle, recruiting