As Japan’s demographics go from pyramid to kite (see The Economist graph here – from “Into the Unknown” article), companies will face an increased challenge for talent attraction.  In the five decades after the second world war, Japan’s working population grew by 37 million people.  This demographic growth, together with an increase in productivity, took Japan from ruins to become the second largest economy in the world (now third, after China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s).

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According to the institute of international education, more and more Asian students are moving to the US to study:
- 103 260 from India
- 98 510 from China
- 75 065 from South Korea
- 29 264 from Japan

In a recent study by Universum, we identified that around half of the Asian students in the US wanted to stay in the countries where they are currently studying an pursue an international career. For those working in the field of talent attraction and employer branding this represents a huge opportunity (for US companies) and a big headache (for the Asian companies needing this talent).

How should US companies use this opportunity? As imigration rules are being tightened, this can be a great opportunity to counter-balance the difficulties of hiring talent from abroad – internships might be a great solution.

How can Asian companies react? Something has to be done to avoid a bigger problem: understanding why students are pursuing an international career and not wanting to return home should be the first step; offering competitive opportunities to get them back wil be the natural second step.

Read more about the study here:
http://www.iie.org/en/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2009/2009-11-16-Open-Doors-2009-International-Students-in-the-US

On an unprecendent move in the talent management field, today Google announced a 10% raise for all employees worldwide, plus a 1000 USD Christmas bonus. The reasons? First to reward their employees for a fantastic year and a job well done; secondly to try to avoid losing talent to competitors. This salary increase has a cost of 1 billion USD… It’s clear that the war for talent in the IT industry is on and the price for employee retention is not cheap.

My question: is a payraise the best way to keep the top talent?

Read more about the raise here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-raise-2010-11
or here:
http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/80323/20101110/google-gives-employees-1000-cash-bonus-10-salary-increase-in-2011.htm

If you’re working in the Employer Branding field or if you’re interested in talent attraction, here’s a must read story: imagine a country where only 60% of the female graduates aged between 25 and 64 are at work. Imagine that in this country, women earn on average 63% of what men do.

At the same time, also in this country, fertility rate is down to 1.15 children.

With this clear trend for a shrinking talent market and if female talent is undervalued and available, firms that hire more women should gain a competitive edge. A proper talent management strategy, based on an adequate employer value proposition that aims at this big gold nugget, can be your weapon of choice in the war for talent.

This is happening in South Korea. Read the full article “Profiting from sexism” in The Economist here:
http://www.economist.com/node/17311877

While reading the FT.com, I came across an interesting article written by Glori Ye: Concern over China’s ‘job-hoppers’. According to this article, in the US, the average working life for a fund manager at the same company is 4.8 to 4.9 years, while in China it’s only 1.68 years. These challenging HR conditions are one of the reasons for the poor results in the funds’ performance and have also forced fund managing companies to have two fund managers per fund – one “old” or existing manager plus a “new” fund manager.

For the employer branding arena, this is a clear sign that talent retention is a strategic issue: not only industries that fail to retain their top talent incur in higher HR costs, but also their performance is weaker. Definitely interesting to think: how much one’s company losing / winning due to bad / good retention strategies?

Employer branding is not a fully independent marketing tool. By being one of the brand components,  it’s still influenced by the company’s corporate and consumer branding strategies. To integrate your employer brand with your consumer and corporate brand is a challenge that companies have to manage to communicate effectively with employees, customers and investors.

Companies with strong consumer or corporate brands often have an advantage when it comes to employer branding. However, a strong consumer brand might sometimes skew the employer image and lead to misconceptions among the recruitment target groups. In this case, the company needs to establish an employer brand that differs to some extent from the corporate and/or consumer brand.

In other cases a strong consumer brand can inflate expectations among candidates, which means that the company faces the risk of falling short of expectations and thereby undermining the employer brand. Believing that a strong consumer brand will automatically translate into a strong employer brand is very risky.

It is wise to:
Use Common Messages
Dare to differentiate
Track expectations

To be continued…

Congratulations to Lenovo for being the first Asian company to make it to Universum’s most attractive employers!

Who wins this year’s title as being the World’s Most Attractive Employer?

Find out by clicking here

Today, we just launched a global landing page to our various corporate blogs. On the right-hand side, you can pick the country you want to read news from, or you can use the drop-down menu above. On this site, we’ll write about global employer branding topics and issues for a global audience. We hope that you’ll find the site interesting and will contribute in making it better. Most of all, we hope that this site will be useful and interesting for all branding, HR and communication professionals.

Your Universum APAC Team