Exploring the dynamics of New Zealand's talent flow

Abstract

Recruiting talented workers has become a global international concern, yet the diversity of human motives driving labour mobility has yet to be captured in any psychometric measure. By means of an internet survey administered through 32 professional associations based in New Zealand, 2201 highly skilled but expatriated New Zealanders completed a 26-item measure of issues pushing them towards staying overseas versus returning to New Zealand. Principal components analysis was used to explore the structure of this instrument, which suggested five motivational components: Lifestyle and Whanau/Family (primarily, for this sample, 'pull' components); and Career; Cultural; and Economic (primarily 'push' components). Discussion focuses on the content validity of this instrument with respect to pools of not originally from New Zealand; on its contribution to theories of career mobility; and on its increasing relevance for recruiters and policy-makers within organisations, government ministries, and global development agencies like OECD, which has recently called specifically for the construction of standardised instrument sets to measure global flow. ********** As the market for jobs becomes progressively global, issues surrounding migration have become increasingly important to organisations. The shift, from locally to globally oriented recruitment, has intensified. The facilitating influences include advances in global networking technology and related increases in job opportunities; air travel becoming increasingly accessible; and the increase in boundaryless careers, both between organisations (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) and more recently between geographical locations (Donohue, 2003). But whatever the cause or causes of the internationalisation of labour markets, the operating environment of organisations is today characterised by a scramble to recruit and retain human talent, and so become employers of international choice (Lavigna & Hays, 2004). Under such conditions, having the capacity to understand and measure the dynamics of international labour becomes crucial to strategic human resource planning, recruitment, and selection (Pillay & Kramers, 2003). The evidence reported in this paper represents a first, exploratory step toward developing a psychological measure of the motivations underlying global migration. It is hoped that this will eventually assist academics and governmental agencies to understand migration and to formulate appropriate policies, and enable organisations to better communicate with potential recruits. A Local Concern In New Zealand, as in other countries, the notion of brain drain has received much attention in the mass media, and has provoked fears that New Zealand is permanently losing a large amount of its intellectual capital to larger and more affluent economies like the UK, the USA, and Australia (Carr, Inkson, & Thorn, in press). This popularised view in the media presents a narrow focus on the reality of the complexities surrounding the movement of around the global arena (Inkson, Carr, Edwards, Thorn, Jackson, Hooks, & Allfree, 2004). From a wider perspective, country X's loss is country Y's, gain, and the process of losing also involves an associated potential for regaining it (Neave, 2004). Moreover, that leaves a country may appreciate abroad before returning to the original country (Inkson & Myers, 2003). We therefore wish to move beyond the 'brain drain' concept by promoting a more dynamic concept of labour mobility and migration--i.e., flow, in which regularly and fluidly moves and changes from location A to location B and vice versa, depending on the net attraction towards A or towards B at a particular time. Conceptual Analysis By talent we refer, in this article, to highly skilled, educated, and/or experienced individuals. Talent flow appears to be composed of at least three major components that are not restricted to the outflow of in brain drain (Leung, Lau, & Kwong, 2004). …