International Organization for Migration (IOM)

executives or managers do not even require a labour certification. This is a distinct
advantage over most other employment visas that require labour certification, which
is a cumbersome and time-consuming process (Chapter 12).
It is noteworthy to recall here that the 2013 IOM LINET study on Recognition of
Qualifications and Competences of Migrants found that, also in the case of recruitment
of already resident immigrants, the complexity and the length of the procedures for
the recognition of foreign qualifications and competences reduces the potential of
efficient jobs-skills matching through migration (IOM, 2013b; see also section 3 of
this chapter for a brief discussion of this topic).
2. Access to labour market information in the case of
foreign recruitment: challenges and good practices
2.1. The employers’ perspective
The study confirmed the original assumption of higher informational barriers involved in
foreign recruitment by SMEs compared with bigger firms. Except for some specific sectoral
patterns, foreign recruitment is largely the fact of multinationals and big firms. Those firms
have a clear informational advantage compared with smaller employers, as they have not
only more internal resources which they can mobilize in view of hiring from abroad, but
also a higher capacity to benefit from public support measures implemented to facilitate the
flow of labour market information for employment matching through migration. On the
other hand, shortcomings in access to information on labour migration procedures, and on
the availability of appropriate migration candidates abroad, together with the uncertainty
around the length of time required to obtain a work-permit for suitable migration candidates,
are the major factors explaining the very limited recourse of SMEs to foreign recruitment
in response to their unmet labour needs. Those information-related asymmetries among
SMEs and bigger firms respectively are particularly acute in the case of temporary labour
shortages, as multinational companies faced with the need to hire from abroad for a shortterm
position have the opportunity to rely on intra-corporate transfers.
Awareness of migration policy and foreign recruitment procedures
Consistently across the countries studied, a lack of awareness of the legal migration
procedures required to recruit a foreign worker from abroad is described as a major
information bottleneck, hampering the potential of migration to respond to unmet
labour shortages. Awareness of legal requirements for foreign recruitment tends to
differ according to the firm size and, in some cases, by sector. While shortages of
qualified workers are reported to be a major challenge for SMEs, research has found
that a significant proportion of small employers do not even realize or consider that
labour migration can be a potential response to this challenge.
Information on the legal migration procedures is generally provided by the competent
public authorities, sometimes in partnership with immigrant-serving organizations.
In the past five to ten years, the sources of information on legal migration procedures
have become increasingly user-friendly in the main immigrant-receiving countries,
eXecutIve summAry – SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
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