News
Globalization Applied to Labour Markets
In the last few years, the Czech Republic is one of a number of Eastern European countries selected by a significant number of multinational corporations as the site of their shared service centres. A report issued by the local Investment and Business Development Agency, CzechInvest, confirms that investments in shared services in Central and Eastern Europe have been an established trend over the past several years, and account for a large share of the investment projects mediated by the agency.
A study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows that the Czech Republic is still a frontrunner among countries when charting the attractiveness of investing in services. In 2006, it was ranked fourth in the world. However, the inundation of investments has made it plain that the Czech labour market is not inexhaustible. The several dozen shared service centres in operation now seem to have driven demand for employees to the limits of what the labour market can provide, and human resources are getting thin on the ground.
That said, Štěpán Hakl, Lufthansa's Global Tele Sales HR manager in Brno, does not sound like someone who feels the situation has reached a dead-end. He believes the current recruitment campaign at the company is successful. "A little more than a year ago, our centre had 50 employees, now there are 160," says Hakl. While the scope of the HR agenda has grown exponentially and recruitment remains a challenge, apart from Hakl shares the talent recruitment role with just one other colleague; that is, with a software application as a valuable partner to help manage the recruitment process. "Information technology has allowed us to minimize tedious paperwork that used to be done by humans and has given us the opportunity to expand recruitment to other countries, covering the whole of Central and Eastern Europe," explains Hakl. The software used at Lufthansa's Brno centre incorporates an 'online recruitment multiposting' function, facilitating the automatic dissemination of the same job offer to multiple countries across the region with a single click.
Indeed, the recruitment of foreign nationals and Eastern European workers seems to be an ideal solution. Besides secondary education, Lufthansa requires a knowledge of English and one other European language for the ticket sales department, and a solid knowledge of both German and English for the aircraft cargo department. Czech is not seen as essential. Lufthansa's Global Tele Sales Brno can advertise vacancies not only in the Czech Republic, but also on job sites in Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere thanks to the application it uses, which is operated by LMC, one of the Central European online job market’s main operators. "Foreign nationals now make up 60% of the call centre's staff," says Hakl. He claims that the payroll costs are very reasonable, and a benefit of online recruitment is they can handle recruitment abroad with their own resources (recruitment agencies are used in roughly 30 % of cases, and this share is steadily decreasing), Global Tele Sales Brno boasts solid cost effectiveness in the recruitment process. For ther SSCs challenged with recruitment problems he recommends not only creativity but also the courage to think in terms of larger regions, rather than specific countries.
Although the Czech Republic already plays host to more than eighty SSCs, it is still a highly attractive prospect for other investors; especially if companies expand their recruitment mindset beyond the borders of a single country and bear in mind that globalization also applies to labour markets.
30.04.2008