Global companies design products in Bangalore. Manufacture in Guangzhou. Distribute through Long Beach. Processes are seamless, instantaneous, and 24x7. At every stage, talent is crucial. Success depends on managing your talent supply and demand across multiple borders and time zones.

What's your global talent strategy? Looking to India and China to solve a talent shortage? Opening a new Eastern European factory? Recruiting for offshore subsidiaries? Your business is leading you to the door. But what are the keys to global talent management success?

1. Determine Organizational Readiness

This exercise helps build your path to success. Survey results and live interactions give your project team a clear picture of each region’s readiness to adopt new processes, practices, and technology. Your project team also meets key sponsors and stakeholders who are critical to success.

2. Establish Measurable Business Goals and Objectives

Defining key business goals is critical at the local and headquarters levels. Measurable goals enable your team to agree on project scope, monitor progress, and measure success. Create tangible goals at key milestones. This enables your team to build on each success step by step.

3. Secure Regional Sponsorship and Engage Shareholders

Securing executive sponsorship helps reinforce corporate vision and creates unity across cultural lines. Regional executives can set the standard for local success, possess the authority to allocate resources, remove obstacles, drive key decisions, and demonstrate a commitment to project success.

4. Assign Strategic Local Project Resources

In determining regional resources, you should get participation of subject matter experts in each area. Local experts can share deep knowledge of local business processes, relationships with external and internal candidates, and expectations of hiring managers.

5. Develop a Strategic Implementation Plan

Build a plan that defines project goals, develops a strategy for achievement, explains how the solution supports the strategy, and ensures value for the users. Describe activities and owners for key project initiatives including process design, change management, content development, training, network assessment, legal review, and data privacy, website navigation, integration, and reporting.

6. Adopt a Phased Implementation Approach

Try a phased approach. That way you achieve cost and productivity savings in key areas of your enterprise quickly. You also avoid the big bang approach where success can only be assured if all regions are ready for the implementation. This level of synchronicity rarely occurs. You also gain valuable feedback from initial phases that you can apply to improve future stages.

7. Define User Support Structure and Ongoing Knowledge Exchange.

The proper setup of a global support structure is important for continued success. A lack of focus on internal support usually leads to disappointing user adoption. Effective support boosts user confidence and helps your organization identify issues and opportunities faster. A global support structure must deal with time zones, languages, cultural differences, and availability of resources.

Global enterprises must manage their talent across multiple geographies, lines of business, hire types, and processes like assessment, acquisition, development, and alignment. Companies like Taleo have simplified this complexity for many of the largest global enterprises worldwide.