Recruitment and training are two essential and unavoidable aspects of multinational firms. International businesses have designed their recruitment policies around either selecting Parent country nationals (PCN) also known as home country nationals; a citizen of the country where the multinational resides, host country nationals (HCN) or local people hired by a multinational or third country nationals. This essay will explain the various factors affecting organisations when recruiting as well as the training procedures adopted by business organisations …
According to (Hamill 1987 and Welch, 1994) factors affecting recruitment can be grouped into three categories, Firm-specific factors such as the strategy of the firm, their organisational culture, stage or mode of internationalization, type or niche of industry, size of international operation, reliance on international markets and top management perception of home HRM systems which would all contribute to the staffing policy they use. Host-contextual factors include political, legal, economic and socio – cultural factors. Other factors include trust and personal moral merits.
There are three approaches to staffing policy which a multinational firm can adopt. These are the ethnocentric approach, polycentric approach and the geocentric approach (Hill, 2011).
A firm using the ethnocentric approach fills all key management positions with parent country nationals; this approach is often used when operations are carried out in less developed countries (Hills, 2011). Although this approach is more costly due to the high costs of using expatriates and might cause cultural myopia. This approach has positive advantages such as good communication, co-ordination and control links with headquarters (Shen 2006). Ethnocentric approach is used by firms using the international strategy.
The polycentric staffing