International Organization for Migration (IOM)

provide a comprehensive package of services to employers willing to hire from
abroad, which may include assisting with the legal formalities to obtain work permits,
identifying prospective migrants with appropriate skills, checking migrants’ foreign
qualifications and documents, and organizing migrants’ arrival and stay. However,
all those services involve costs, which SMEs may be barely able or willing to afford
especially since they generally recruit a limited number of workers. In Poland,
EastWestLink, the country’s biggest job agency dealing with the employment of
migrants, offers both employee recruitment and hiring out, as well as employment
support and services of obtaining work permits. The range of services proposed is
extremely comprehensive. An employer interested in hiring a migrant worker may
commission to the agency the responsibility of the whole process – from finding an
employee, through arrangement of all requisite documents, organization of his arrival
to Poland, transit to work, to arrangement of his departure after employment ends.
The agency also offers translation of the documents confirming the qualifications,
and during employment. The gathered information suggests that a decisive majority
of the agency’s clients are large enterprises interested in employing at least a dozen or
several dozen workers (among which are Budimex – a large construction company,
the Hard Coal Mine in Katowice, and Gdańsk Shipyard) (Chapter 8).
Similarly, an employer willing to hire more than 10 workers from abroad or for
whom foreign recruitment is a regular practice, may be more disposed to afford
the relatively expensive costs involved in an international advertising campaign, in
consideration of the expected returns of those investments. At the same time, the
costs of advertising are generally lower and the likelihood of success higher for big
firms, whose reputation represents a competitive advantage in this respect.
Even when vacancy advertisement and job-matching are not paying services per se,
as when they happen through publicly funded online job-banks, the exercise may
require that the enterprise has specifically trained human resources and assets to
devote to it, which is less often the case for SMEs as compared with bigger firms.
Information-related risks associated to the difficulties in verifying the genuine
nature of information reported in curriculum vitae filed online may involve the need
for the employer to organize an in-depth selection interview. Thus, in the case of
foreign recruitment, Internet matching tools seem to better serve big firms – and
notably multinationals – with departments or business partners abroad who can
arrange interviews in the country of residence of the applicant, than SMEs with
small human resource management capacity. Similar considerations apply to the
international employment matching process established through consular lists12 .
In Canada, the government maintains an online job-bank, www.workingincanada.
gc.ca designed to function as a hub connecting Canadian employers with anyone
looking to work in Canada, from both inside and outside the country. Employers
can use this website to advertise and recruit for free. While this is a general service,
12 For a discussion of the pros and cons of the use of job-seekers lists and databases established in the
context of bilateral agreements between migrants’ countries of origin and destination, see section 2.2.
eXecutIve summAry – SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
29