On the surface, perfect harmony appears to prevail in the supply and demand for international talent. More and more executives want to work abroad. Global companies increasingly desire their services. But when it gets down to cases – particular candidates, companies, and countries – attracting top international talent can be a daunting challenge. The key to success: addressing the highly specific stumbling blocks that candidates see standing in their way.

As recently as 10 years ago, many talented executives did not regard experience working in a foreign country as essential for building a successful career. No longer. Today, executives recognize the many opportunities for career advancement that working internationally can bring. They understand the power of the global economy and they want to play an integral part in it. Many also have personal characteristics – energy, drive, and curiosity – that impel them to explore new things, new cultures, and new vocational challenges. They're eager to learn, and they believe that taking risks is part of the price of professional and personal growth.

Meanwhile, more companies than ever seek to attract global talent. They're looking for executives who know important foreign markets, who know how to manage across cultures and across truly global enterprises, and who bring a diversity of outlook and ideas to the organization. These companies want to act quickly in emerging and established global markets, and they will aggressively go after international talent.

But into this apparent harmony of interests, reality can inject some highly discordant notes:

• Although the number of executives who want to work abroad is growing, the pool of genuine international talent remains quite small. In our experience only a very small percentage of highly talented executives have worked in three or more countries for 18 months or more. Further, we have found that during times of severe economic downturn, executives in secure positions – even those who might be highly qualified for international work – demonstrate far less willingness to relocate abroad. And of course the talent pool shrinks even more dramatically when it comes down to a particular position in a particular company and country.
  
  
• Geographical differences – both real and perceived – work against a “perfect market” for international talent. In a perfect international talent market, the flow of executives back and forth among countries would be steady and proportional. But, as corporate recruiters know, the flow of talent among countries is disproportional and uneven. As with any market, the talent market is conditioned in each country by specific economic and social conditions, and some countries appear to be magnets for international talent, while others do not.
  
  Different nationalities see different countries and regions as more desirable places than others for working abroad. Broad generalizations can of course be dangerous, but we do see some readily identifiable macro-trends. For example, we find that many European executives are eager to work in the U.S. because of the size and power of its market. These executives feel, as in the words of the Frank Sinatra song about New York, that if they can make it there they can make it anywhere. We also find that many European executives are willing to work in China or India. By contrast, many Americans are somewhat less willing to work in Europe and are even more difficult to recruit for positions in China and India. Further, it is difficult to attract talent to small countries that are at the margins of economic power or cutting-edge technology, or even to “marginal” cities in economic and technological powerhouses.
  
  
• Money and professional opportunity are no longer sufficient inducements. Gone are the days when the willingness of talented executives to move depended simply on the size of the paycheck. Even the magnitude of professional opportunities in new and emerging markets or in some of the world’s largest and most well established markets is often not enough to persuade talented executives to move abroad. Many are in two-career marriages to spouses who are reluctant to give up their jobs. Many also hesitate to disrupt the lives of their children, move away from ailing parents, or abandon a favored lifestyle. The most farseeing among these executives, looking to the day when they might want to return home, worry about the difficulties of re-establishing their professional and personal networks.
  
  
• Many executives, despite appearances, are unsuited for working abroad. Because international experience is increasingly seen as a wise career move, more and more executives are likely to seek it, even though they may not be suited for it. They may believe that they are ready and they may insist that they want to do it. But unless they genuinely possess the personal characteristics and professional competencies required for working in an unfamiliar environment they and their employers are likely to soon regret their association.
  
  It is therefore essential to be able to know how to filter out such candidates early in the recruiting process. Such assessment requires considerable subtly and experience on the part of recruiters – both in the ability to read between the lines of the candidate’s record and to conduct probing interviews that uncover the candidate’s intercultural sensitivity, flexibility, adventurousness, and motivations. In our experience, we have found that among the handful of indispensable competencies that top executives must possess, skill at collaborating and influencing is particularly important for working abroad, and recruiters must be able to assess candidates along that dimension.
  
  
• Corporate recruiting practices often fail to address today’s realities. Despite the strongly stated desire of many companies to attract international talent, candidates are often treated as if they were simply national hires rather than as people who are being asked to make profoundly life-altering decisions. All too often, executives are hired and left to sink or swim, although working abroad can be fraught with distinctive difficulties that strong organizational support could help mitigate.
  
  Even good intentions can backfire. For example, international executives are sometimes paid more than their local colleagues, for many good reasons: to induce executives to move abroad or to compensate for currency differences, tax differentials, or the expense and disruption of uprooting a family. In the new location, however, the executive’s colleagues may resent the difference in compensation or place unreasonably high expectations on someone who is so well paid. Further, if things go badly, it’s easier to fire the foreign stranger than the local neighbor.
  
  When executives return to their home countries they often find that the company has given little thought to their re-entry, sticking them in project roles, rather than positions of real influence befitting their international experience. Savvy executives are aware of these horror stories, and recruiters who don’t address the entire lifecycle of the position – from day one to support throughout the assignment and to successful re-integration in the home country – are likely to find even the most generous job offers being rejected.

These multiple difficulties are further compounded by the requirements of all recruiting – assessing the competencies of candidates, determining their fit with the company’s culture, reaching agreement on compensation, and much more. Under these circumstances, acquiring international talent can challenge even the highly adept HR departments of successful global companies.

The cost of failure can be high. When recruiters are unable to fill a key international position in a timely manner market opportunities can rapidly slip away. Similarly, executives who perform poorly or abruptly depart are likely to leave a trail of unfulfilled business objectives and missed opportunities, as well as incur an opportunity cost to their careers. Further, in our experience, the cost to a company of premature returns varies based on several factors, but it is often in the $250,000 to $1 million range and can include the costs of wasted training and the cost of executing another round of recruiting for the position. But those costs pale in comparison with the far larger business costs of thwarted global strategy or the waste of the hard-won experience of executives when they return home.

Details, Details: Getting International Recruiting Right

Because the details that must be addressed are greatly multiplied when it comes to international recruiting, companies may be forgiven if they sometimes neglect some of those details. However, they do so at considerable risk of failing to secure the best available talent. In our experience, this neglect is most likely to occur at the end of the process, after a highly desirable candidate has been identified but not yet persuaded to accept the position. To address the many details that together could be decisive for the candidate at this point, recruiters should:

• Communicate clearly the full dimensions of the professional opportunity. The high-level goal of gaining international experience may have induced the candidate to listen to an offer, but it is unlikely by itself to be enough to close the deal. It is the specifics – the details – of the opportunity that will have the most weight. That will include the job opportunity – the scope of the position, the candidate’s future with the company, compensation, title, and the like. But, more importantly, it means the professional opportunity. If, for example, the position is in an emerging country, the opportunity may lie in cracking a potentially enormous market, building an entire business, or pioneering a new business model. The recruiter should explore what the candidate is likely to learn in the position and, in the largest sense, how the opportunity can transform his or her career. In the last analysis, for most top executives it’s not about what they will have the opportunity to be but about what they will have the opportunity to do.
  
  
• Tie the candidate’s motivations into the recruiter’s geography. In the course of recruiting, the recruiter should have learned a great deal about the candidate’s needs, goals, and personality – in short, what really motivates that person. Those motivations should be tied by the recruiter to the location of the position. This is often easier when the location is one of the great cities of the world and candidates, as many do, desire such cosmopolitanism for themselves and their children. It may be more difficult for less celebrated locations or with cultures that the candidate might consider more alien. Nevertheless, a recruiter who has really come to know the candidate should be able to find quite specific attractions for the candidate, whether those attractions are professional, familial, or matters of values or preferred lifestyle.
  
  
• Identify and correct misperceptions and cultural biases. We’re all familiar with cultural stereotypes and clichés about various countries. These can range from simple misperceptions about the climate or taxes to profound misunderstandings of social practices and norms. As with professional and personal motivations, recruiters should uncover these misperceptions and misunderstandings and address them. While uncovering simple misgivings about weather or the like is relatively easy, uncovering and forthrightly addressing deep cultural biases requires great sensitivity on the part of the recruiter. Meanwhile, in countries where attracting international talent is a perennial problem, savvy global companies and HR leaders will also try to persuade host governments to sell the virtues of their countries through public relations campaigns and other global outreach programs as, for example, Singapore and South Korea have done.
  
  
• Be candid about corporate culture. Of course, not all perceptions about other cultures are merely stereotypes. Cultures, especially corporate cultures, do differ from country to country. As with all of the other sensitive issues associated with a foreign move, candor is required on the part of the recruiter. Explain honestly what the candidate can expect in terms of hierarchy, decision-making, openness, collegiality, and all of the other critical interactions that make up the company’s culture in the new location. More importantly, the company should be prepared with an on-boarding plan that is specifically designed to ease the integration of the candidate into the company culture. Again, the devil is in the details – the onboarding shouldn’t simply be designed to accommodate international transition generally but to accommodate the movement of, for example, a Scandinavian executive into a German corporate culture, or a French executive into an Indian company, and so on.
  
  
• Be prepared to offset real drawbacks. Recruiters should also be willing to concede – and even point out – some of the real drawbacks that a foreign move can entail for a candidate. Most importantly, the company should be willing to materially address those drawbacks. For example, the executive might very likely need help with tax filing. Executives concerned about the continuity of their children’s educations may need help with highly expensive international schooling. In countries where establishing a social life might be particularly difficult, the company can provide the executive with club memberships. For candidates in dual-career marriages, the company can provide the spouse with career assistance in the new location.
  
  
• Facilitate visits by the candidate and candidate’s spouse before hiring. Interestingly, we’ve found that some global companies will send their own executives to visit a foreign location before posting them there, but that they rarely do so with external candidates. Such visits enable the executive and the executive’s spouse to explore the housing, educational, and professional opportunities first hand and get a feel for what it would be like to live and work in the new location. Foregoing such pre-hiring visits of external candidates may save a small amount of money in the short run, but it can lead to far higher costs later when an executive doesn’t succeed in the new setting because of disappointed expectations, family issues, or a culture clash. That is why, in our work with global companies, we urge that they adopt the practice of pre-hire visits.
  
  
• Help mitigate up front the difficulties of re-entry. Corporate recruiters should not only pay attention to the details of pre-hiring, onboarding, and continuing support of the executive throughout the job abroad but also look far ahead to the other side of the assignment entirely – that time when the executive decides to return home.
  
  Re-entry can be difficult. Returning executives often find that their social networks have frayed, their former colleagues have moved on, and foreign experience is undervalued. We counsel all of the international executives with whom we work to take some concrete steps to maintain their connections to their home country: visit every six months or so to keep relationships fresh, serve on the board of a company there, seek to work on international projects that will keep them connected to their home country, and find a mentor inside or outside the company who has been through the experience. Companies can help by appointing mentors and enabling international executives to make trips home in order to maintain social and professional networks. By demonstrating an understanding of the problems of re-entry and a willingness to address them, the company can overcome what is often a candidate’s most deep-seated – and difficult to articulate – reservation about taking an otherwise highly attractive position.

Applying these principles and getting all of the details right can be a complex and difficult challenge, but it can certainly be done. In the past three years alone, Egon Zehnder International has completed searches for more than 2,000 international candidates. In all of these engagements we have seen these principles work, no matter where the business cycle stood. We know first-hand what a difference a comprehensive process can make, including a reliable means of indentifying the right talent, a close relationship with the candidate throughout the lifecycle of the position and beyond, careful attention to family and other concerns, and a nuanced and experienced approach to intercultural issues.

For companies that get this process right the rewards can be great. An outstanding international appointment can accelerate the success of the company in critical markets, facilitate the sharing of best practices around the world, and contribute to the kind of genuinely global corporate culture companies say they want and that globalization demands. Just as importantly, success in an international role accelerates the career of the executive, imparting experience and knowledge that can be of incalculable value to the company in the future. To reap these rewards, companies must invest the time and effort from the very beginning of the international recruiting process and proactively address the many highly specific issues it entails. To do any less is to greatly multiply the risk of failure in a process that is already challenging enough.