Cultural reality of global commerce

By Selwyn Parker

"It's blatant racism," says the chief executive of a successful New Zealand software company about the legion of highly qualified immigrants who cannot get jobs.

"You don't hire people on the colour of their skin."

In his company, which is a mini-United Nations, some of the staff can hardly speak English. But they have been hired because they are brilliant software engineers, not because of their mastery of English. Besides, they are learning English quickly.

Despite or because of its polyglot nature, this company is highly profitable and exporting its software over half the world.

It represents a vision of the future which has eluded some New Zealand companies.

If commerce becomes more global every day, would it not make sense for the composition of your staff to reflect that fact?

When I spent an hour last year with a class of adult immigrants at the Auckland Institute of Technology (now the Auckland University of Technology), I was struck by two things.

First, I found I was addressing an impressive and diverse array of talent. In their home countries they had been translators, doctors, teachers, physicists, mathematicians, chemists and chief executives.

Second, they were disillusioned. Most of them had applied unsuccessfully for numerous jobs.

"As an immigrant in New Zealand, you start with a handicap," a Spanish woman said. Her English was accented but nearly perfect and I kept on wondering how many New Zealanders spoke Spanish as well as she spoke English.

After I wrote an article about the shortage of specialists in the job market, quoting numerous talent search companies, I received a bitter letter from a South African.

When he and his family emigrated a couple of years ago to "New Zealand, The Right Choice," as the Government's brochure to prospective arrivals says, they were excited because they had been assured their prospects were outstanding.

He is a specialist in the management of public affairs; his wife is a highly qualified nurse.

After months of trying for jobs that matched their skills, he has a commission-only salesman's job and she a low-paid position, albeit in nursing.

A Hungarian chemist specialising in food technology, supposedly an undersupplied discipline, has been in New Zealand for years but can find only part-time work. A PhD in civil engineering is unemployed. A former European diplomat is stacking supermarket shelves. An Iranian doctor drives a taxi. A South African who once managed a retailer with turnover of $10 million a year cannot get a job anywhere near his skills.

Their attitude varies between confusion, despair, bitterness and anger.

Some get mad and give up.

However, some immigrants could do a better job of selling themselves by recognising they are in a different environment.

For example, say potential employers, they do not provide in CVs New Zealand equivalents of the firms they worked for or of the skills they have.

Aside from the well-documented cases of blatant exploitation of immigrants, the main block in hiring immigrants appears to be of "the devil you know" variety.

Some employers prefer to employ New Zealanders simply because they feel uncomfortable with people with funny accents, and they think their customers do too.

In a world where a knowledge of cultures and languages has rapidly become commercially essential, this could be a mistake.

As Chris Jones, chief executive of Auckland-based Telemedia, remarked when a customer complained that the expert on his help desk spoke English with a Chinese accent: "So what, a lot of my customers are Chinese."