Executive Recruiting, Asian Style
For U.S. firms operating in Asia, how to recruit good middle and senior managers has long been a puzzle.
Should they move one of their American executives, often at great expense, or hire someone overseas? If hiring abroad, should they take on American or European expatriates or opt for local nationals? How much should they pay, and what other compensation or perquisites are required?
The equation, of course, is complicated by the company’s line of business, its experience in Asia and the great differences in the culture, history and degrees of economic development and freedom among Asian nations.
“It’s easy to refer to the Pacific Rim as one monolithic entity, but it’s best to think of the region as a diverse group of economic and cultural islands,” said Putney Westerfield, president of Boyden International of New York, an executive search firm with nine offices in Asia and a 10th in Australia.
In Japan, for example, a U.S. company would have relatively little trouble finding a seasoned Japanese marketing manager. But experienced local marketing managers are rare in South Korea and senior executives are hard to find, partly because so many men who would now be in their 50s were killed during the Korean War.
Problems and Pitfalls
Boyden sponsored a forum here this week to drum up business and help U.S. companies negotiate the shoals that they face when seeking managers in Asia. The daylong session was attended by personnel executives of about 60 companies, including such giants as Bank of America, G. D. Searle & Co., Intel Corp. and Rockwell International.
The session was aimed at helping them to better understand the array of problems and pitfalls, local customs, legal requirements and other subtleties in hiring for overseas positions.
They heard, for example, that in the past five years, Japanese managers have become much more open to job overtures from U.S. and other multinational companies.
“Five years ago, two-thirds of the Japanese business elite wouldn’t even talk to me,” said Atsuo Tsukada, Boyden’s senior vice president in Tokyo. But now, attracted by the prospects of higher pay, greater responsibilities and faster opportunities for promotion, “nobody declines phone calls,” he said.
Tsukada counseled U.S. and European multinationals seeking managers for Japanese assignments “to look on your own front doorstep.” There are hundreds of Westernized Japanese managers working in such financial centers as New York, Los Angeles and London, and those who are homesick might respond well to the right overture.
Tsukada and other Boyden officials said many U.S. firms stumble when hiring Asian nationals by overemphasizing fluency in English. Reasonable proficiency is a must, of course, but extreme fluency could mask other deficiencies.
Unique to Certain Nations
“The guy who speaks fluent English may not have other smarts,” said Tsukada, who also tries to weed out what he calls “bananas”--Japanese “whose skin is yellow but who are white on the inside.” Such executives, he said, have a hard time getting along with other Japanese and rarely work out well for U.S. employers.
Some problems are unique to certain nations. In Malaysia, for example, strict racial quotas at all levels of business complicate executive searches. In China, because of limited entertainment opportunities, foreign executives posted there often demand four paid “rest and relaxation” trips abroad each year.
Titles for Asian managers must be carefully thought out. In Japan and Hong Kong, the word “director” implies board membership and should be avoided. The word “regional” implies great power and can boost an executive’s compensation by 30%.
Checking a prospective employee’s references is not easy in most Asian nations. “It’s very tough to get a Japanese to talk about the business abilities or disabilities of an associate,” said Boyden’s W. Stanley Holt, senior vice president and manager for Tokyo and Seoul. “Someone either walks on water or you wouldn’t have them near you.”
Definitions can also be a problem, noted Thomas M. Heysek, the firm’s managing director for the ASEAN Region.
“For Chinese, a ‘good manager’ might resemble the chief auditor from a Dickens novel, someone who is very hard on people,” he said.
Different countries have different compensation structures. An American posted to a top position in Hong Kong can expect a housing allowance of as much as $70,000 a year for a family of four. In Taiwan and Singapore, a Chinese New Year bonus equal to between five and six months’ salary is customary. And most managers in Indonesia rate a car and driver, whose salary is just $100 a month.
The status of women executives also varies widely from country to country. Women face few obstacles in Singapore and are making slow but steady progress in Japan. But they are said to have difficult times in the Muslim nations of Malaysia and Indonesia.
The few women who make it in the Muslim countries “are very impressive,” one recruiter said. “They’re different. They’re aggressive.”
