How to Overcome Cross Cultural Issues in Recruitment?

Cross culture is not only about geographic distance, but also differences in social norms, verbal and non-verbal language and so on among cultures. During cross cultural recruitment process, recruiters may make regular mistakes which can lead to wrong recruiting decisions. Here are some tips that top recruitment experts of Vietnam Manpower recommend to overcome these issues:

- Choosing sources of recruitment:

Choosing the right channels of job advertising is the very first step on the way to hire the best candidates for your vacancies. Make sure that the job postings are available in your official social profiles and websites. LinkedIn is the largest professional social network worldwide, but for some countries, people prefer other platforms. As a recruiter, you should take this kind of difference into account.

- Resume/CV screening:

People from different cultural backgrounds bring themselves different ways of resume/CV presentation. In most of Asia countries such as Japan, South Korea, China… candidates often consider education as the most important part in the resumes and put it in the top, right below personal information. Meanwhile, Western recruiters usually assess resumes based on candidates’ skills and experiences. To prevent from unnecessary mistakes when screening resume/CV, recruiter should build a standard form of application and ask candidates to follow.

- Interviewing:

During the interview, recruiters may get trouble in collecting needed information because of differences in cultural perception. With the same question, candidates from different cultural background can answer in different ways. For instance, when you ask “Tell me about yourself”, East Asian candidates often tell you briefly about their education and experiences in a modest manner, Middle East candidates want to talk about their family backgrounds while the U.S candidates try to mention their accomplishments as much as possible. Moreover, some questions shouldn’t be used to ask candidates from some nations.

Beside verbal language barrier, misunderstanding of body language (face expressions, eye contact, postures and gestures or other nonverbal cues) can be the reason for rejecting potential talent. Asian doesn’t always make direct eye contact as American does, but it doesn’t mean they are not confident enough. In cross cultural recruitment, you always need to remember the differences between high context and low context cultures.

- Making hiring decision:

Obviously, the final objective of recruitment is to hire the right candidates who can contribute the best to the company as well as fit the company’s culture. In cross cultural recruitment process, recruiters need to make more efforts than usual to select the real talent. All of recruiters involving in recruitment process must have cross cultural mindset to exactly assess knowledge, skills and abilities of candidates from different backgrounds. The most ideal recruitment team should have the engagement of members from different cultures. By taking effective actions, the company can gain benefits from diamond-in-the-rough candidates in global talent pool.