By Dorus Swinkels

 

Recently I was talking to a potential client that was complaining about how difficult it is to hire technical employees. I was curious, so asked him why he struggled so much. He answered that there would not be enough qualified candidates in The Netherlands. My natural reaction was to ask him why he did not recruit abroad, on which he told me that they did not want to do it because ‘it would not work at their company.’

 

I was astonished.

 

On my way back in the car, I realized why I was so shook by what he said. Ever since I started my career in recruitment, internationalization has been the common thread. For me it was simply unimaginable that you would not take full advantage of all the talent that is out there.

 

It made me think back to my early career, in which I was working for an international recruitment agency. The Brainport area just started flourishing and the leading high-tech companies were really open to everyone, as long as they had the right competences of course. There was a lot of international interest and the Dutch government started to stimulate it as well. For me, it was back then already crystal clear that this would be the beginning of the future, and that this trend was going to turn into a permanent change.

 

But at that time, I was running far ahead of the game. If even my own employer was not ready, how could I expect the industry to be? With offices all over the world it was impossible to collaborate between countries due to the commercial infrastructure of the company. We had all the cards in our hands to expand our talent search internationally, but our own business model was limiting us. Something was really off here.

 

Therefore, I decided to move on and went working for a Dutch expat company. Here I learned what internationalization really means. I learned what it really means to move entire families all over the world and what the impact on both employee and employer is. From here I developed my career into Talent Acquisition where I worked as an interim recruiter for many leading technical companies.

 

When I started working for an international automotive supplier company in 2011, I had to recruit over a 100 engineers: within one year, in the Netherlands ánd with automotive experience. A mission impossible? No. But I immediately managed expectations that we would not find all these 100 in The Netherlands alone, and therefore I started recruiting abroad too. In one year, we went from 2 nationalities to 20! You can imagine the culture shock for the company. But in the end, it worked out perfectly for them.

 

My career developed and I became globally responsible for talent acquisition and talent management. I was fortunate to see much of the world and work with great colleagues all over the world. I learned a lot about different cultures and this made me more humble. I slowly took off my ‘western goggles’. One of the greatest lessons that was ever taught to me by my mentor back then was that ‘globalization is not westernization’, and I stand by that until this day.

 

In 2019, I started my own company: Successr. After all the experiences I had, I felt that I had enough experience and knowledge to help companies that are facing fast (international) growth and/or change.

 

One of the great opportunities it started with was at Vanderlande. We had the privilege to help them build their global infrastructure and implement the new HR strategy that would support their global growth. We build a global TA community, build a globally aligned recruitment process, and hired talent all over the world to build Vanderlande to an internationally successful company. We totally let go of thinking in locations, put a global team together and managed to hire even the most challenging positions for them (like 15 software architects that they needed on a very tight deadline). We were all able to pull it off because we were thinking internationally.

 

Global thinking is also at the heart of Successr now. As a scale-up, we are growing superfast, but I am dedicated to build a global team. We live in 2021, and that means COVID-19 has a changed the world forever and the ‘global nomad’ life is rocking up.

 

The days that we were solely working in a permanent office at a permanent place, from 9-5 are gone. We totally acknowledge this, so we have our people (an international remote sourcing team and some global nomads) working for us all over the world.

 

Now looking back at the beginning of my career, I knew I was right. And again, I feel like I am running ahead of the game. International recruitment is here to stay. It will only make a stronger impact on our lives in the coming years, so the excuse of ‘it will not work at our company’ is one that you should throw in the bin right now. Anything is possible as long as you are willing to think over country borders and believe in real people and talent instead of a strict vacancy text.