Recruiting for the BIG picture

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Recruiting for the BIG picture

08/04/2010 by Thomas Mitchell

Terra Australis (from the Latin “the unknown land of the South”) was a hypothetical continent appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th century. The Spanish name for the continent was La Australia del Espíritu Santo (”the southern land of the Holy Spirit”).

Juan Fernandez, sailing from Chile in 1576, claimed he had discovered this Southern Continent. Luis Vaez de Torres, a Spanish navigator working for the Spanish Crown, proved the existence of a passage south of New Guinea, now known as Torres Strait. And Pedro Fernandes de Quieros, also sailing for the Spanish Crown, saw a large island south of New Guinea in 1606.

From that time onwards the southern land of the Holy Spirit seemingly slipped from the Spanish radar, and it was ultimately settled as a far-flung outpost of the British Empire. And the British saw fit to use the continent as a receptacle for its criminal detritus, rather than as a grail wherein to discover the Holy Spirit.

Our recruitment consultancy aims to rekindle this Spanish interest in Australia. And we’re going to make a profit while we’re at it. So consider the following three paragraphs, and you’ll begin to learn how. We want to recruit for the BIG picture, and while we’re not sure that the BIG picture will unfold in the near future, we do take comfort in ’shampoo wisdom’: it won’t happen overnight - but it WILL happen.

Australia is home to 375,000 Spanish-speakers, of whom less than one third are native speakers. Spanish-speakers comprise only 2.3% of our 21 million-strong population. Contrast this with other Anglophone cultures: The United States boasts 15% of its population as Spanish-speaking, the United Kingdom 6.5%, Canada 3%, and New Zealand 0.5%. And consider the same statistics for our major regional Asian trading partners: China counts only 0.001124% of its 1.3 billion-strong population as Spanish-speaking, Japan only 0.1%, and India doesn’t even bother to count.

Now consider that, in 2010, 358 million people speak Spanish as a native language, and that a total of 500 million people speak it worldwide. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is further recognised as an official language of major trade and political blocs such as the European Union, the Organisation of American States, the Organisation of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American States, the Latin Union, the CARICOM, and the North American Free Trade Agreement Area.

Finally, consider that Spanish is the second most natively-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, and the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after Chinese and English). And global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese.

To our minds these are a beautiful set of numbers that speak of two important facts. First, Chinese-speakers and Spanish-speakers are the two largest markets in the world, and at some point they are going to want to talk to each other. Second, Australia doesn’t have enough people capable of bringing these markets together, or capable of bringing the Spanish-speaking market to other Asian powers such as Japan or India.

So how do you create a business around bringing the Spanish and Asian worlds together? Well, we certainly don’t have any experience in exporting Spanish wind turbines to Australia. And nor do we have experience in building Chinese civilian nuclear energy plants in Argentina. We don’t sell paella pans to Mumbai, and nor do we know the first thing about getting Spanish cava onto a menu in Shanghai….

….but our clients do, and when they want to expand their Asian businesses in a convenient, politically-stable, well-regulated, sensibly-taxed and foreign-capital-friendly investment destination like Australia, then we’ll be there to help them. And we’ll help them by finding them the talent they need, speaking the language they need, and at the time that they need it.