As some may know, I’ve been overseas for the past month. Mostly a “holiday”, it coincides with my wife attending a conference, the societally-imposed guilt she feels to see her family, and some “me time” in both Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpar. As she is sort-of-working, so am I. A couple of hours a day on my phone or laptop. Nothing too hectic. Just excuse enough to avoid talking to relatives for too long. Today I’m poolside in Malaysia and contemplating the realities of this way of remote working. Not so much the “I live in Avondale and don’t want to drive to the city”remote kind of working. I’m talking about the digital nomad/gonad type of working where youngsters decide to sell digital marketing from Bali for 6 months a year.
Once upon a time (and I’m talking a few years ago, not when London town was illuminated by Kiwi whale oil), remote working wasn’t a thing. Then the world changed and loads of us went home and largely stayed. In recent times this has extended to not just domestic remote working, but like OMCs seminal 1995 Classic, it’s gone international. I remember a couple of years ago, I spoke to an eager young buck who was keen to join the recruitment industry. They had some decent b2b sales experience and the prerequisite level of charisma to do well. Unfortunately, their non-negotiable was to work from overseas for 4 months a year as “that’s what my mates do“. I of course laughed. Having spent 4 weeks (semi)working remotely, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts with a bit more substance.
The big challenge in recruiting into a country that you don’t reside is obvious: time difference. If you want to live in London and recruit in New Zealand or Australia, you best be a f*cking vampire. Mainland Europe (in my case Greece) seems ever harder. You can spend your days catching up on emails, but when it comes to any personal interaction, you’re screwed. And it’s just not that you have two windows a day to chat. It’s also that at each window, you and your overseas contact are in very different headspaces. Stupid as it sounds, I’ve found that talking to someone who just woke up as you’re winding down incredibly ineffective. You try it if you haven’t already. One wants to talk business, the other wants to contemplate if the stars are just pinholes in the curtain of night.
The solution of course is to move to a country on a similar time zone. Malaysia is four hours behind Aotearoa. If I start at 8am, I catch your lunch break. That could work. If I decided to live like the average digital gonad, eating vegan bowls in a country that didn’t have veganism until 2018, I could live in Bali with the same time difference. If I was a massive biller, maybe I could justify this to my boss for a few months a year.
Truth is, it’ll never work.
There are a few fundamental challenges when recruiting from overseas that even trump the time difference. A big one, and one that I labour over today, is the intangible disconnect between you and your market. Writing a blog, I have to have a handle on what’s happening in the New Zealand recruitment market. Even though I check my emails, read the Herald, stay logged in to Slack, and check LinkedIn, I’m still out of the loop. And I’ve been away for four weeks. I’m not saying I need to live in the city to understand what’s going down, but I certainly need to be in the country. It’s like there’s a heartbeat that I need to be close enough to hear. Out here in Malaysia, I might as well check your pulse with Tarot cards.
There’s a bigger flaw in international remote working however. One that is plainly obvious but seldom considered. If you want to move to a country because it’s so amazing, how will you ever stop doing amazing things and actually do some work? Right now, I’m sitting by a pool, drinking a cocktail, watching my family play in the water. Once I’ve pumped out these few hundred words, am I about to do some business development? Am I f*ck! Doesn’t living in an amazing country, but keeping ungodly hours, and being tied to the one spot in the hotel room that gets good Wi-Fi kinda defeat the purpose of being there? It all looks great in the brochure, but think of the discipline you need to give a solid 8 hours a day to your craft. It’s bad enough being with my family, but if I were a single man with an NZ salary in my pocket and living in Asia, I’d probably be dead. Too much access to vice would not serve me well. I don’t know if a man has ever died from a sticky ping-pong ball to the throat, but I’d give it a shot.
There are solutions for those recruiters contemplating living overseas. Firstly, recruitment exists everywhere now. And thanks to those friendly colonisers, it’s mostly done in English. Alternatively, you could just bill loads, and unlike me, switch off the phone, put on the OoO and have an amazing holiday a couple of times a year. It’s much easier.
Back in the city of sails next week.
^SW
