Asia’s booming economy has created a special need for natives with Western experience.

By Fred Cohn

The boom in Asia’s economy has created a corresponding growth in its job market. Companies are hiring not just in established business centres like Hong Kong and Singapore, but in the second- and third-tier cities that are now flourishing throughout the area.

But whilst top professionals, even those without native language and cultural skills, have traditionally been able to flourish in the continent’s more cosmopolitan cities, employers in Asia now increasingly need – and demand – candidates who demonstrate cultural fluency. The situation has put a special premium on native Asians who have developed international cultural skills. Because of this, Asian expatriates – natives who are now studying or working abroad – are a particularly desirable subgroup.

Luckily, many Asian expatriates are bound by family and cultural ties to their home countries. Companies who can target this population and make the right kind of value propositions stand a good chance of attracting these sought-after candidates.

If one area has come out ahead of the global financial crisis, it’s Asia. Asian financial institutions, less involved than their overseas counterparts in the derivatives based financial products that lay at the root of the crisis, have been in a better position to bounce back. And with that recovery has come a boom in jobs. Local companies that cut back during the crisis are restaffing and eagerly recruiting. In the words of Bettina Wassener, Hong Kong-based business correspondent for the International Herald Tribune: “Asia is doing a helluva lot better than job markets elsewhere.”

The situation creates a special degree of pressure for firms that seek top talent to staff their Asian operations. For sure, the talent pool is probably deeper than ever before: skilled people who in the past may have stayed in Europe or the US are now looking east, attracted by the rise in opportunity. But the very best candidates certainly are looking at an ever-expanding selection of job possibilities.

In many cases, the most desirable candidates are Asian natives. International business hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore have long attracted top-tier foreign-born employees who may lack native cultural skills. But even though the area continues to attract Westerners, companies are particularly eager to hire native Asians for their Asian offices.

“If you had two candidates of the same skill set, one from the home country versus one from overseas, there’s no question that the native will win out,” said Mark Ellwood, managing director in Asia (except for Japan) for Robert Walters, the international headhunting company.

Home, sweet home

Take Disney – a company whose image is all but synonymous with America. But in its Hong Kong Disneyland operations, it stresses native language skills. The company now uses an assessment tool for all Hong Kong applicants to customer-facing roles, gauging their “Putonghua” (i.e., Mandarin) competency.

“We believe as our business from mainland China grows, this assessment will help us to select those candidates who can deliver the best service possible to our guests,” said Greg Morley, director of human resources. Employers are also aware that a Westerner may be looking at an Asian job as a temporary posting – a stint. Some employers are scarcely eager to train and acclimatise employees, only to have them turn on their heels and go back to the West in two or three years.

“If they hire someone who has never lived [in Asia],” said Wassener, “after six months they could easily say ‘My parents aren’t well’ or ‘I can’t stand it here’ and head back to Frankfurt or L.A.”

It creates a special degree of competition for one particular category of candidate: Asian expatriates, now working or studying abroad, who are considering a return to the East. These workers bring a best-of-all-possible worlds combination of Western business skills and native cultural competency. And unlike their Western-born counterparts, when they return home, they’re often there for good – especially considering the strong family ties that dominate Asian culture, with its emphasis on respect for elders. The Chinese speak of the “sea turtle” phenomenon: people who work or study abroad then lay their eggs right where they came from.

That sense of rootedness means a lot when employers are assessing candidates: Asians are the ones who are more likely to stay. “Let’s say I’m an employer in Singapore, and I can hire a Singaporean who went overseas to study,” said Chris Mead, general manager in Singapore for Hays, the global recruiting firm. “They’ve had their first and second jobs abroad – maybe three to six years, working for a European, UK or US bank. For me as an employer, if someone like that can be found and tapped on the shoulder, there’s much less risk associated with the hire.”

“For individuals who still have family ties and a strong affinity to the region and their home country, returning to an attractive company in an attractive role is appealing,” said Ellwood. “The current growth in Asia lets them use their skill set as an opportunity to return home in a senior position, with influence within an organization on the senior level.”

Global perspective

Five years ago, Continental AG, the German based automotive parts company, started its “Global Engineering Excellence” initiative, collaborating with prestigious technical universities to develop tools for global excellence.

The initiative features a “Global Engineering Internship Program,” through which students work on problem solving, whilst becoming involved with the company and its culture.

Through the initiative the company maintains a strong presence on campuses with large proportions of Asians amongst the student body, like Georgia Tech and MIT in the U.S. In quite a few cases, the programme succeeds in bringing Asians back to their home countries to work for Continental.

“Because we act globally, we look for people who have experiences outside their home country – Germans outside of Germany, Asians outside of Asia,” said Sehnaz Özden, Continental’s head of corporate employer branding & recruiting.

Continental makes a special point of posting specific jobs, like a factory controller at a Chinese plant, at foreign universities. It offers a training programme, bringing in new hires for six months at company headquarters in Hanover before sending them back to their home countries. But some of Continental’s recruiting tactics are as low-tech and grassroots as can be imagined, like distributing fliers and coasters on overseas campuses, with marketing messages aimed at Asian students. Internet communications are especially useful in recruiting Asian candidates and the close-knit nature of expat communities makes word of mouth an especially effective tool.

Stepping-up recruiting

Reacting to the upsurge in Asian economies, Hays, the headhunting company, recently stepped up its own internal recruiting, seeking professionals to staff its expanding Hong Kong and Singapore offices. It ran a campaign at the University of Auckland – the New Zealand institution with a high number of Chinese expatriates in the student body – urging Chinese people to join the team and sponsoring them for their return.

“If people understand our business and have experience in the country, we need them in China,” explained Emma Charnock, Hong Kong-based regional director for Hays. The programme was so successful that a number of Hays’s clients have approached the firm to run similar campaigns.

The demand for Asian cultural competency may present recruiters with a challenge. But there’s definitely a talent pool of people who combine Western-style expertise with Asian cultural and language skills. It all reflects the extraordinary vitality of Asia as a whole. “We’re just seeing the first part of the tidal wave,” said Chris Mead of Hays. “There’s very little doubt that this century is Asia’s century.”