International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
30
not targeting migrants, it is reported to be the most widely used public job-bank
to connect potential immigrants and temporary workers with Canadian employers.
The reason for this is that CIC and HRSDC heavily promote the portal to migrants
(Chapter 11). However, the Canadian study suggests that, for the job-matching
to take place from abroad based on online applications, employers should be in a
position not only to contact the candidates, but also to have enough information on
their competences to make a job offer. In this respect, multinational corporations
with offices in migrants’ countries of origin have a clear competitive advantage over
SMEs.
The study found that – with the exception of the information bottlenecks which
may arise from shortcomings in the immigration procedures and in the recognition
of foreign qualifications – multinationals do not face specific information obstacles
for matching up with potential employees in the case of foreign recruitment
as compared with recruitment in their country of operation. Their recruitment
practices do not differ substantially in each of the two situations, since, through
their offices and subsidiaries around the world, multinationals can easily have
direct contact with any potential employee abroad. In the United States, a recent
and growing trend is that of multinational corporations using their overseas
subsidiaries to hire workers abroad. Generally, those workers are employed at the
overseas subsidiaries for a certain period before getting transferred to the United
States office (Chapter 12). It is important to mention here that the possibility
of intra-corporate transfers is a powerful tool for multinationals to address their
temporary labour shortages, and one which offsets most of the information costs
involved in foreign recruitment. Evidence of large recourse to intra-corporate
transfers by big corporations for temporary recruitment of skilled workers was
found in the United States and in Sweden.
In general, big firms tend to have less recourse to informal networks in their
recruitment strategies, compared with smaller ones. To some extent these
differences by employer size are a reflection of more standardized approaches and
professionalized human resources practices of larger organizations, which in turn
result from lesser resource constraints. However, in some of the countries studied,
regardless of their higher opportunities to use formal channels for international
jobs-skills matching, big firms also seem to make a large use of informal networks
in their international recruitment strategies. Indeed, big firms are in a better
position than SMEs even when they recur to social networks, due to their
capacity to mobilize larger connections. In Sweden, personal networks are the
most commonly used means across all firm sizes for employment matching both
through migration and in the domestic labour market (Chapter 9). In Germany,
an analysis of the success rating of different international recruitment channels by
firms in the federal state of Baden Wurttemberg indicated that personal contacts
are perceived as the most successful international recruitment channel (Chapter
6). The relevant difference as compared with smaller firms is that, while these
often have to rely exclusively on personal networks, big firms tend to use them in
combination with other, more formal, tools.