The job market is now global

“64% of job seekers worldwide are interested in working abroad”

BCG, Recruit Work Institute, 2016

With the rapid spread of globalisation, job markets across the world are being faced with an increasing need to adapt to new vectors such as employee mobility, the need for multi-cultural work environments and, indeed, a fiercer competition for talent.

Equally challenging for job seekers, this new landscape brings about more complexity in choosing positions worth applying for and assessing their chances of success against candidates from everywhere.

In such an environment, employer branding has become a key differentiator in the success of HR teams worldwide, but this is a game of a few winners, considering candidates can only be aware of a fairly limited number of brands and job opportunities at once.

Moreover, it can drive costs to the roof. Companies that have it at the core of their business strategy to develop a global presence will do better than most in attracting qualified candidates, but this will increase their spending with sorting through the sea of applications. At the other side of the spectrum, local brands or industries, that don’t normally have strong global marketing teams, might struggle to attract applicants and will have put in more and more resources to gain visibility.

Talent shortage is one of the top reasons that recruiters mention to be hindering their ability to fill vacant positions, with as much as 40% of employers worldwide being affected by it (Manpower, 2016), and yet many people struggle to find jobs.

The main driver of this situation is the fact that the era of digitalization and automation that we’re going through is making many jobs obsolete while creating others in areas where not enough people are qualified yet. Another one, can easily be that in an unprecedented globalized job market we’re just failing to properly match talent demand and supply and bring the right job opportunities in front of the right candidates.

Building tools that enable better mobility of talent across countries can address the skills mismatch that exists in most economies, and it’s a very tiny step we can take in the direction of tackling a very important global issue.

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Photo credits —NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — http://bit.ly/2yJwPb2