By Christopher Van Mossevelde.

Due to a critical shortage of experienced staff, attrition is an “every-day hazard for companies operating in East Asia”, reports the FT.

In her article, “Aggressive hiring keeps the talent moving”, Elaine Moore, gives the example of RBS Coutts, which lost one third of its staff to its rival BSI.

According to her, the war for talent is not only affecting private banking and big corporations, but also small businesses where employees are known to switch jobs for minimal salary increases.

Michal Kalinowski, UNIVERSUM’s CEO, was quoted saying “In 2010, the first Chinese company entered Universum’s World’s Most Attractive Employers list (a global index of Employer attractiveness). An interesting sign of things to come is that for the first time ever there is a Chinese company in the top 50 – Lenovo at 44 among engineers”.

The report featured UNIVERSUM’s data on East Asian Students’ Career expectations and the ideal employers in Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Japan.

Quoting various experts in the field, however, the article’s main arguments were: 1) salary increases do not guarantee retention and 2) employers should assess cultural & motivational fit between candidate and the organisation prior to employment.

As Chinese companies continue to dominate the indexes of employer attractiveness (rankings here), it is with some dismay that I notice only a few western companies getting ready to address the challenge of talent attraction in the medium term.

Furthermore, looking at the business plans of some top western-world companies, a major growth is expected to come from BRIC; but how these companies are expecting to deliver in such big markets remains partially a mystery. What I know is that attracting talent will be a major challenge and without human capital, how are the companies going to deliver on such different markets?

Long gone are the days where being an international company represented a competitive advantage in the talent market. Nowadays, Asian talent has career expectations that they perceive only achievable in local companies. If western companies want to achieve success in Asia, the time to start building their talent pipeline is… right… now!