International Management

International Management and HRM: Approaches to International Resourcing and Recruitment

[Name of Student]

International Management and HRM: Approaches to International Resourcing and Recruitment

Introduction

The purpose of the paper is to strive to understand the approaches to international resourcing and recruitment at IBM, particularly the approach of attracting a more diverse workforce. In international human resource management, staffing is one of the most important functions of an organization. Effective staffing and managing staff is critical to an international organization to achieve competitive advantage, internationally. Likewise, effective approaches to international resourcing and recruitment will help in gaining and attracting talented resources from across the globe, which will impact the level of performance of an organization. International resourcing is of significance importance as it requires a deep understanding of the work environments and labour market trends in the subsidiary company's country. It also requires searching of skills availability, pay trend and various laws concerning recruitment issues in the host country. Likewise, international recruitment requires being aware of the educational qualifications, language barriers, cross cultural sensitivity, personal adaptability and training needs in the host country.

IBM is considered as the leading provider of IT and IT-related services. International resourcing and recruitment emerged as strategic issue for IBM, as it needs to understand the impact of changing workforce demographics and globalisation in order to facilitate provision of coverage of new developments in global mobility. The linking of HR practices to the broader long-term needs of the IBM, in global context, has led to an issue of defining various approaches to international resourcing and recruitment. The paper also analyses the contextual factors contributing towards the issue of international resourcing and recruitment at IBM.

Background literature

World is turning into a global village would be a truism to point out. This globalisation has impacted our communications, travels, economies and even our understanding. The globalisation has led to formation of several global enterprises, which has led to a rapid economic change by involving a number of diverse workforce, rising complexity and ambiguity. The concept of international resourcing and recruitment can be better understood with an example of a multinational company's case study. A multinational corporation (MNC) is an enterprise that operates globally, but is managed from the company's headquarter in the home country. The MNC accounts for approximately 80 per cent of the world's total industrial output (Brewster, 2011, pp. 4-8). International resourcing and recruitment becomes a critical issue at the strategic level, as it involves HR managers to consider a number of underlying factors that contribute towards successful recruitment and retention of employees across the global subsidiaries. This phenomenon of linking HR practices to the broader needs of an organization is the essence of strategic human resource management (Storey, 2000, pp. 347-369). In the process of globalization, a company has to create a balance between globally standardized, localized or optimized HR processes (Sparrow, 2007, pp. 845-867). A research report reveals that as the world has turned into a global village, the managing of resources is a challenging issue across Europe ...