What are the unique impacts on a company that must staff in international settings?

Staffing in Global Companies

The usual staffing becomes even more complicated when the organizations enter into the international markets. The laws, organizational culture, the culture of the countries and a number of other factors have to be taken into account while making the staffing decisions and policies.

In international setting, a firm would have to deal with that following staffing issues

• Expats: The managers would have to decide which the home country nationals would occupy positions in the foreign country branch of the company. Most of the time the expatriate tend to have a top management position in the foreign subsidiaries of the firm. (Ando, 2013)
• Returning employees: The companies would also have to deal with the problem of hiring new employees when the expatriate return to their country on retirement, resignation, transfer,
• Salary structure: The companies also have to deal with the issue of employee compensation and pay structure. The employees that are exported from the home country tend to demand higher pays than the local employees of the foreign country.

The company would also be impacted in terms of types of staffing. In international setting following types of staffing exist (Collings, 2009) :

• Ethnocentric Staffing

In such cases, the top management of the global branches of the companies are the nationals from the home country. In most of the cases, the reason is that the company believes that their employees have better knowledge and experience the foreign nationals to deal with the company issues.

• Polycentric staffing

This involves the hiring of nationals of the country where the firm is opening its global operations because it is believed that the locals will have a better knowledge of the local markets.

• Geocentric staffing

In such a type the global companies hire do not give preference to home or host country nationals but hire the person best suited for the job. This person can be anyone even a national of the third country who is not related to either home or host country

• Regio-centric Staffing

This is a type of international staffing that resembles both geocentric and polycentric staffing. In this type the companies hire personnel from the regions that are similar to the country where they are establishing their global operations. (Tarique, Caligiuria, & Colakoglua, 2009)

Thus while doing business on the international scale companies have to take special staffing considerations into account.