Expatriate recruitment: The importance of incorporating a country’s professional and cultural values into the recruitment process

Each country has its own set of professional values that has been gradually established and which has evolved over time.

These values are either implicit or explicit, but they exist in each country.
Too often, we witness situations where a consultant from an international recruitment firm ” sources ” a candidate for a position on the African continent from Paris and presents him with professional values of an African country that do not correspond to reality.

It is true that it is indeed impossible to have a good cultural and professional expertise of an African country when one has never set foot there…
This discrepancy between what future expatriates perceive and the reality of an African country with its identity and functional codes is often at the root of their integration difficulties.

A good knowledge of the professional and cultural context of a country will allow a candidate to optimize his expatriation preparation to be part of an intercultural dynamic around the following objectives:

• Acknowledging the cultural differences among employees to optimize management performance
• Understand the motivational factors of his teams at the operational level to build a relationship of trust
• Leading his own change in questioning his cultural paradigm in order to adopt behavioral reflexes in line with the professional values of his collaborators
• Adapt his communication to promote the exchange and transmission of skills