The client planned to hire people from several countries, but we narrowed that long list to 4−6 countries. The geography of the search would depend on the availability of suitable candidates, among other things.
First of all, we examined countries for the presence of a large and active diaspora in order to determine the size of the potential market. The reason for it is that the representatives of the diaspora — people from Russia, the CIS and Ukraine, who have moved to work in the EU countries and send money home — are the key customers of our client. We studied the Russian-speaking resources in the selected countries, social networks (including local chats and groups) as well as statistical data. This allowed us to shorten the list of priority countries in order to narrow the geography and speed up the search. The most promising were identified:
— Germany, long-term leader in the number of immigrants
— France, where the Russian diaspora is wide and far-reaching
— Eastern European countries, where the cost of living is lower than in many neighboring countries
— the United Kingdom, which was initially on the client’s list of priorities due to the variety of its financial flows
— Cyprus and Greece
The next steps were the active promotion of the vacancy and the selection of candidates. In addition to the active search through the popular job sites/boards and LinkedIn, we checked the local Telegram channels and Facebook groups. For each of the target countries, we found online communities of Russian-speaking specialists looking for work.
These local communities became our main source of candidates for each country, except for the UK and Poland. The following chart shows the data on the specialists we reached out to: