Global Experience: Tips from a Recruiter’s point of view
Hello! I am Fernanda, a Talent Acquisition Manager here at Sinch, but before starting here I worked for five years in other tech companies with very different scenarios and HR areas but always looking for recruitment. Sometimes overseeing only a few cities, and other times looking for different countries, but no doubts that Sinch is the company where I had the most of this “global experience”, which I think is amazing! But can also have some challenges.
It’s not my first experience with different cultures, since I have previously lived in Spain for a few months, and also worked with other countries before, mainly in Latam, and considering that Brazil is such a big country, recruiting in very different regions here can also present some culture challenges and differences. While I believe this can make the work more complex, it’s also something that I love about this job! We get to know a lot of different ways to think, communicate, deal with problems and find solutions, and also live!
I have learned from my previous experiences working with tech HR and from my graduation in psychology, that I am a very adaptive person, which helps me a lot to understand the way people prefer to communicate, for example, and adapt to it. But during my journey here at Sinch I received a recommendation about a book called “The Culture Map” (Erin Meyer) and it was very helpful to have a better understanding of how to navigate during all these differences that we are dealing with every day and I completely recommend it to you if you’re interested in a global challenge for your career!
When we are talking about recruiting on a global scale, I believe that even with all the differences there are some common points that we are always looking for:
Openness/ Open Mind: be open to hearing and learning with everyone! Understanding how communication is important, and how people might have different ways to say things than what you are used to. Listening carefully and speaking in a very clear way, trying to guarantee that the others are getting what you are trying to say. Look for the different POVs and meet people halfway.
Resilience: There will always be a lot of challenges, and you are most probably going to deal with new things at a high frequency, so it is very important that you are able to see the big picture and keep the motivation to improve, move forward and, what I believe is the next point, adapt.
Adaptiveness: with so many different points of view, many times you will need to adapt to new realities, processes, people, and culture, and even knowing that it could be frustrating for some people, you need to keep moving forward, understanding how things are in this new scenario and asking yourself: “how can I help to make it even better in this new reality?”
In Sinch Culture we believe in two aspects that I feel are very related to: #KeepItSimple and #MakeItHappen. I’ve learned during my experiences that change is needed to keep the company competitive and increase results, part of the process is to make tests and sometimes we need to try again, so more than the topics I’ve already said, I believe having data about all these movements helps us a lot to evaluate our decisions in a more objective and simple way, and make it happen!
