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What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Recruiting Expatriate Staff Over Local Staff

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When companies engage in a cross-national border business, there is often the need to send employees among the parent country nationals (PCNs) to manage the company’s activities. This strategy of staffing is known as ethnocentric staffing and these employees are regarded as expatriate while the host country nationals (HCNs) are regarded as local staff (Robson & Society for Human Resource Management (U.S.), 2008).
That being said, there are numerous advantages and disadvantages of recruiting expatriate staff over local staff. Some of the advantages are:
a. Expatriate staff understands the company’s values. Every company has a cherished value that distinguished its operations from other companies and by recruiting expatriate staff, the company’s value is certainly guaranteed to continue in the foreign …show more content…

Some of the disadvantages are:
a. Expatriate staffs are expensive. Imagine sending an expatriate with a family of four to a foreign country, the cost of maintenance would triple the cost of recruiting a local staff. Similarly, expatriate staffs enjoy special benefits to compensate the inconveniences of working far from home country. These huge expenses make it a disadvantage of recruiting expatriate staff over local staff.
b. Expatriate staffs are ignorant of the local culture. Recruiting a local staff eliminates the cost of training an expatriate on intercultural issues. Because the expatriate staff is unfamiliar with the local culture, there will often be the struggle to acclimatize and adapt to the new culture. Additionally, the expatriate staff does not know how the employment system in the host country is so to recruit local staff will pose an enormous challenge for the expatriate staff (Malamud & Rotenberg, 2010). Additionally, expatriate staffs will not efficiently and effectively network with local stakeholders because of language and cultural

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