For all of those among our readers that also have a global responsibility for recruiting, employment and further development of employees in their company, we would like to recommend a book written by the professors Caligiuri, Lepak and Bonache. The first two have chairs at the Rutgers University in New Jersey, Jaime Bonache does research and teaches at the ESADE Business School in Barcelona. Usually we are a bit sceptical of books whose authors have a purely academic background, because they often have too little practical use for everyday life of human resource developers and HR managers. In this case ("Managing the Global Workforce") it does not apply, though, because the book offers a good conceptional frame for the global setup and control of an international staff. What has convinced us as "strategic personnel developers" is the approach that the first step of the implementation always has to be done by the strategy of a company, independent of the country in which the company operates. That is why the authors have deliberately dedicated the first chapter after the introduction to the subject of strategy. Besides the strategy, it´s the dimensions of the HR systems and multicultural needs, that define global HR management. Building on this framework, chapters with the main HR fields follow:
a) planning the global workforce with regard to its mobility in the fields of humans, knowledge and jobs
b) competency management: from recruitment up to development and
c) the management of the most divers attitudes and behaviours.
What remains open? Concrete business examples of how the respective challenges of a "global player" or of an internationally operating medium-sized company were implemented surely would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the book can serve you - the experienced HR manager - as a successful basic framework to check and compare the current status of your own business.