TM - August 2008 - (Page 35)

Carolyn Koenig, chief human resources ofﬁcer for Laird Technologies, a global technology company that designs and manufactures antenna and electromagnetic interference equipment, said the H-1B issue is affecting the company’s efforts to recruit and retain skilled workers for its design centers in San Jose, Calif.; Stockholm, Sweden; and Shanghai, China. “When I think about the world as my talent pool in which to attract from, I can certainly ﬁll those openings,” Koenig said. “But when I have the immigration rules on top of that, I have to come up with a whole new business strategy to meet those needs.” The $1.3 billion company, with nearly 15,000 employees in 15 countries, has a global strategy that requires it to leverage talent to meet the needs of clients such as Nokia, Samsung and General Motors across the world. The ability to hire and transplant talent across the globe to share expertise is critical to Lairds’ continued growth. “It doesn’t serve me well as a global company to have my U.S. employees thinking and doing things from a U.S.-centric way and my Asians and Europeans doing it in their customized ways,” Koenig said. A growing chorus of voices are singing the same tune. In recent years, Microsoft executives have consistently stated the H-1B visa restriction hinders the company’s ability to grow and get the skilled talent needed to compete. In testimony before Congress in March, Chairman Bill Gates said the company is able to obtain visas for only one-third of the foreign-born workers the company wants to hire. In July 2007, the company announced it would open a software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia, staffed in large part by new hires denied an H-1B visa. Economic Impacts: Productivity , Performance and Growth The Microsoft move illustrates that immigration reform has tangible economic impacts on multiple fronts, from jobs to economic output. It’s in that economic effect that immigration restrictions become most clear. Continued economic growth depends on two factors. “If we’re looking to increase per capita growth, increase living standards and increase overall wealth in the economy, GDP growth depends on labor force growth and productivity growth,” said David Vance, president of Manage Learning LLC and former chief economist and head of the business intelligence unit at Caterpillar Inc. Because of the declining birth rate in the United States, immigration is a main driver for labor force growth. From a productivity standpoint, immigration doesn’t play a signiﬁcant macroeconomic role, but it can play a critical microeconomic role in individual companies. “If you look at it from an organizational level, immigration is incredibly important to an organization’s productivity, which will translate into impact on the larger economy because it brings in the critical talent,” Vance said. Vance said Caterpillar faced a chronic shortage of skilled engineers and economists from the United States, and the ability to recruit skilled foreign workers for those positions played an important role in the company’s success. “If you can’t get that critical talent, the economic consequences of that would be a reduction in productivity, innovation, in design, manufacturing — the whole gamut,” he said. At Laird Technologies, the challenge goes beyond productivity to its ability to drive growth and revenue. Koenig said the company has been growing at a 20 to 30 percent rate each year, and she estimates more than 100 skilled positions are unﬁlled at any time. That lack of critical talent can translate to lost business. “We feel we have great productivity and an excellent quality and design process,” Koenig said. “The challenge is there’s only so much you can do. You can’t take nine women and have a baby in a month. Sometimes you can do it faster and more efﬁciently, but other times, you absolutely need the people to meet the customer demands.” The Partnership for New York’s report indicates skilled H-1B workers have a direct impact on corporate performance because of their specialized skills. The report points to the example of a Manhattan consulting ﬁrm that employed a Mandarin-speaking H-1B professional who was able to negotiate critical supply contracts with Chinese vendors for a South Carolina manufacturer. “That work helped restore the [manufacturer] to proﬁtability, and it helped safeguard the employment of 900 U.S employees,” Torres said. “For one H-1B visa holder, 900 people in the U.S. kept their jobs. That’s an aspect of H-1B that few people consider — that it can be a job-retention tool, as well as a way to bring talent into the country.” Skilled workers also can drive economic growth by creating additional job opportunities domestically. In his congressional testimony, Microsoft’s Gates pointed to a study from the National Foundation for American Policy that identiﬁed ﬁve additional jobs created around every H-1B visa holder. Opponents of the H-1B visa program say the program takes jobs away from qualiﬁed American workers and replaces them with lower-paid foreign labor. VisaNow’s Meltzer said that’s simply not the case. “In the H category, it’s not really possible,” he said. “The H category requires that you pay the minimum prevailing wage for that occupation, so there’s no beneﬁt ﬁnancially to hire foreign labor. The companies hiring foreign labor are hiring it because there are not enough U.S students coming out with bachelor’s degrees in those areas to ﬁll those jobs.” In the short term, companies need to plug the talent gap to drive continued growth, said Torres of the Partnership for New York City. PERFORMANCE continued on page 56 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com August 2008 35 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of TM - August 2008

TM - August 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Foundations Global Background Screening Does Global Assessment Work? Global Total Renumeration: Creat One Organization Border Insecurity: Immigration Reform and Talent Management The Global Workforce: Communication Across Cultures Around the World in How Many Days? Insight: Exelon: Performance Under Pressure Special Report: Perspectives on Managing People Application: Reinventing Sales Rewards at Motorola Dashboard: Mideast Meets West Dashboard: Mergers and Acquisitions 2008 - Don’t Leave Employees Behind Editorial Resources Advertisers' Index Full Potential

TM - August 2008

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