IT workers are a very mobile workforce and employers who want to attract the best from around the world are looking to the Internet to extend their search for skilled workers.
Internet job Web sites are an easier, more economical way of recruiting workers from around the world, according to Frank Quinn, IT director at Dublin-based JobUniverse, which is affiliated with ComputerWorld Canada‘s IT job site, JobUniverse.ca.
Advertising on the Web is “always a fraction of print, so it’s much more economical than print. There’s no doubt of that,” Quinn said.
Job Web sites can also connect international job recruiters and searchers to those in other countries around the world at the click of a button. Whereas most newspaper ads are local, Internet users can either confine their search to a specific city or expand their quest to almost anywhere in the world.
“On the Internet you don’t have to be geographically located in one spot. You can send [job searches] out everywhere and sit back and wait,” said Joanne Caron, the director of research development and operations at Montreal’s Monster.ca.
But most workers aren’t looking around the world for a job. International job seekers tend not to move too far away from home, according to Quinn.
“What we’re tending to see is that it’s not a global market so much as it is a sub-global market, in the sense that people move from New Zealand to Australia, from Canada to the U.S., from Sweden to Norway to Denmark — sort of logical groups of regions in the world, rather than making a huge jump from one side of the world to the other.”
There are exceptions, however.
“It’s always the case that the U.S. is the receiving end of people from anywhere in the world,” Quinn said.
And Canada attracts a lot of workers from India and Russia, Caron said.
“Canada is considered the land of opportunity for a lot of countries in the world. It’s supposed to be the best place on Earth right now, and the rest of the world knows that. They look to Canada as a great place to have a future.”
International companies with global offices are starting to take advantage of the Web’s ubiquitous nature. Major U.S. corporations “are looking for one central location to advertise all over the world – to place job ads throughout the whole of the JobUniverse network,” said JobUniverse operations manager Paul Healy in Dublin.
Companies opening offices in Canada will also use the Web to set up interviews before they arrive, Caron said.
And for large, international corporations, the Internet has other advantages. Corporations who get hundreds of r
