CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, April 28th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Shadowing recruitment processes in ‘inclusive’ organizations  

Laurence Romani

Professor, Stockholm School of Economics
Director of the Center for Responsible Leadership

How can more skilled migrants be employed at their qualification level?

The management literature has only recently started to address this question, investigating the role that organizations can play in this multi-faceted challenge.

Our current knowledge indicates that problems generally relate to the difficulties of organizations to recognize the adequacy of the foreign skills, to match candidates with their positions on offer or to understand how they fit the organization.

In this presentation, we relate to the social capital literature for the study of an initiative organized by a private company to recruit skilled migrants.
With an in-depth qualitative investigation, we explore the recruitment of candidates to this program, and when and how their capital was recognized. Contrary to expectations, it appears that the recognition of the migrants’ skills was not limited in time (e.g., at the screening process), but rather at (almost) every step of the recruitment. In addition, the skilled migrants’ merits were not considered as a given, but were constantly (re)evaluated.

This case study provides a unique insight into an organizational initiative for the recruitment of migrants while contributing to theory by showing the volatility in evaluating academic merits of migrants. When each step of a recruitment process is about distinguishing and ranking candidates, the assessors do not usually question the recognition of the applicant’s merits. For migrants, it seems that their merits are constantly re-evaluated unless they are embodied in a way recognizable in the local context.

Mandatory Registration. Thank You.

To find out more:

• Stockholm School of Economics (Personal Homepage)

• The Center for Responsible Leadership

Laurence Romani is also CIVICA Academic Lead for SSE.