Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) in collaboration with the American Chamber of Commerce, the Netherlands, hosted a lively discussion on the challenges involved in attracting and retaining international talents.
Led by an expert panel, the audience included leading figures from Rotterdam's international business community, city representatives, expats and representatives from RSM's student associations.
In a rapidly globalising world, geographical mobility – the ability and willingness to live and work in different countries – is seen by many companies as a key characteristic of top talents. And as competition for talent continues to intensify the debate on how to attract and retain these individuals shows no sign of letting up.
As a business school boasting one of the most international student and staff bodies in the world, and servicing a rapidly globalising, local business community, RSM is ideally placed to host this debate.
The expert panel was chaired by professor Steef van de Velde of RSM and included representatives from the port of Rotterdam, RSM's STAR study association, the city of Rotterdam's marketing department, the HR director of international shipping and seafood company Stolt Nielsen and a representative of Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Key questions emerged around the question of: who should be responsible for attracting and retaining top talent to a specific location? Whether and how differences in age and stage of career affect the attractiveness of an international assignment? And what features are needed to make a location desirable to expats?
For mid-career professionals, often married with children, services associated with schooling and family support are seen as key to both attracting and retaining these talents.
Increasingly, the rise of dual careers means that opportunities for spouse employment and immigration policies that smooth that path must also be in place. As recent reports continue to show, an unhappy spouse is still the leading reason that international assignments fail.
Overt gestures, such as events or dedicated help-desks designed to formally welcome and support expats along with company provided training to prepare the family for expatriation were cited as ways to improve.
For younger talent, such as the graduates of RSM's degree and MBA programmes the pull and push factors can be somewhat different. These internationally experienced graduates are very attractive to employers both in Rotterdam and abroad. They combine an international perspective with well-developed cross-cultural skills and have already adapted to the local environment over the course of their study.
For this group, opinion was split as to whether pull or push factors were more influential. Student representatives cited a perceived lack of effort on the part of international companies in Rotterdam to make themselves known to students along with the unwillingness of those same companies to take on graduates who don't speak Dutch – a point hotly debated by the international companies present who reported that up to a third of their local workforce are non-Dutch speakers.
For others the explanation lay with the graduates themselves for whom, having spent three years studying at RSM, the desire was to simply move on and explore the next place rather than settle down and stay in Rotterdam.
