How to tap into immigrant talent

More than 1 million immigrants and refugees arrive in the U.S. each year, with the largest numbers coming from China, Mexico, and India.[1]

These people bring with them a wealth of skills, experience, and diverse perspectives that can benefit your organization. However, they often face barriers to finding employment, such as a lack of recognized qualifications, not having access to professional networks, and linguistic challenges.

Yet these disadvantages often have little or no relevance in relation to the skills and personalities you need on your teams.

In this article, we’ll look at how tapping into the skilled resources that immigrants offer can enrich your company culture, give you access to valuable expertise, and allow you to build stronger teams –  all of which can benefit your business performance.

Additionally, we’ll outline how hiring people based on skills rather than qualifications helps you more quickly recruit the employees your teams need.

What challenges do immigrants encounter during recruitment?

There’s plenty of compelling evidence to demonstrate the benefits immigrants bring to organizations, yet hiring them and supporting their integration remains a challenge for businesses. We look at some of those challenges below.

While the share of immigrants whose work requires prior training or extensive experience is growing year-on-year, immigrant employees continue to face barriers that inhibit their ability to get hired or advance their careers.[2]* For example:

• Employers may lack a detailed understanding of the relevant immigration laws and hesitate to hire immigrants due to concerns about breaking the law.

• Discrimination or unconscious bias can lead to a lack of employer recognition

• Immigrants may struggle to transfer their professional credentials

• Inadequate employer understanding can cause immigrants’ professional experience to be undervalued

• A lack of cultural or linguistic knowledge can harm immigrants during hiring and review processes

As a result, many immigrants work in roles below their expertise level. This not only negatively impacts the immigrant experience but also means organizations are missing out on their significant potential, which we explore below.

To learn more about some of the terms that are used around this subject, read our piece on how the “low-skill” label hurts the workforce.

Which skills do immigrants bring to the table?

Broadening your hiring pools to include more immigrants can add diversity to your teams and reinforce your core values and DE&I initiatives, which can be a game changer for business performance. 

This is because research shows a correlation between diversity in the workplace and positive impacts on branding, financial results, innovation, talent acquisition, and employee retention.[3]

In addition to bringing unique experiences to your teams, multilingual skills, and high levels of motivation and commitment, studies show that immigrants are more adaptable.[4] This is increasingly relevant as soft skills become more and more important in fast-changing businesses as they respond to automation, AI, and other disruptive technologies.

Academic research into this area seems to support these ideas – see below a study on how hiring immigrant talent is associated with gaining a competitive advantage.

The impact of immigrants on organizational performance

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the impact of hiring immigrant players for soccer teams and found that “the number of immigrant players in the club’s starting lineup has a positive local average treatment effect on the club’s performance.”

You might question the validity of comparing sports with other workplaces; however, in support of the analogy, soccer clubs are ideally placed to measure key individual and team metrics against the performance of rivals within a highly competitive space. 

Since soccer clubs are very active in scouting talent in global markets, comparing the impact of that talent on their results could be a strong indicator of how organizations elsewhere could benefit from hiring within immigrant talent pools.

The study’s results found that hiring more immigrant players was associated with “a better goal differential and a higher probability of winning.”

Intriguingly, the study also found that “organizations that employ more immigrants may outperform others because [immigrant players] may deploy a wider variety of strategic actions,” which could point toward greater adaptability among immigrant hires.

The paper concludes that “removing constraints on an organization’s ability to deploy immigrants improves organizational competitive performance.”

Barriers your organization might present to immigrants

Without personal and professional experience in their new country, immigrants are immediately disadvantaged in the job market – and it’s possible your organization is exacerbating those challenges with flawed hiring practices.

Unconscious bias within the hiring process

Unconscious bias can take many forms. It can be very difficult to fully address within a team or organization since, by its nature, it’s hard to recognize. 

For example, research has shown that non-native accents can cause native listeners to doubt what’s been said and can also have an impact on job evaluation, task assignment, and career advancement.[5][6]

Meanwhile, employers may take into account a candidate’s local professional experience when making hiring decisions, despite it having no direct bearing on their suitability for a role. Immigrants will likely lack this local experience, and some immigrant candidates may be disadvantageously measured against a native candidate’s ability to “sell themselves.” 

What’s essentially an elevator pitch for a position, where the candidate has to concisely summarize their skills, experience, and positive characteristics, can be linguistically challenging for a non-native speaker. This is especially true if the hiring manager is questioning them using job-related terms that aren’t commonly used in daily language.

Challenges related to qualifications and recommendations

If your job descriptions specify certain qualifications, immigrant candidates may struggle to get through your first round of assessments, despite possibly being fully qualified and experienced in their native country.

To manage this, immigrants can have their credentials evaluated by an agency that determines the local equivalency. However, this can be a costly and time-consuming process that may still fail to get through your filtering and vetting processes. 

Additionally, immigrant workers often lack access to the same professional networks as native workers. Therefore, they may face challenges in securing professional references. If your hiring process looks for strong recommendations when evaluating applicants, you could be disadvantaging your ideal candidate.

6 strategies for supporting immigrant talent

Building the right conditions for your company to access immigrant talent pools and support immigrant hires relies on a holistic recruitment approach and ongoing commitment to inclusive practices.  

Here are some of the key strategies that will help you successfully recruit and retain more talented immigrants.

1. Create a culture of inclusion and belonging

With a diverse team that values inclusivity, you can create a positive loop of attitudes and behaviors, helping you successfully recruit and integrate immigrant employees. 

A company culture that views working alongside immigrants as natural and positive helps your organization make new immigrant hires feel welcomed, valued, and supported. This gives your company the best chance of fully tapping into their mix of hard and soft skills.

There are many different approaches you can take to help make your organization more inclusive, some of which we discuss below. These include training, employee resource groups, and skills-based hiring.

2. Implement training and reinforcement on unconscious bias

Crucial to creating an inclusive and welcoming culture is educating your teams and growing their awareness of how unconscious bias can negatively impact their perspectives and decision-making.

With guiding principles in place and regular reinforcement of key ideas, your teams can avoid typical harmful behaviors, like stereotyping immigrant coworkers, which can lead to issues such as:

• Undue questioning of a skilled and experienced peer’s judgment

• Microaggressions that could come in the form of culturally insensitive humor

• Culturally ignorant questioning during the recruitment process or internal assessments

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) training, workshops on systems-focused language, mentorship from senior employees, and cultural competency training with situational role-plays can all make a positive contribution to your DE&I initiatives. This, in turn, will help you build a workplace that’s more inclusive of and welcoming toward employees from diverse backgrounds and cultures. 

3. Use leadership to foster an inclusive environment

Leadership teams set an example for the entire organization, so their attitudes and behaviors can significantly influence the successful integration of immigrant hires. However, inclusive leadership isn’t only limited to race, ethnicity, and nationality – it also encompasses elements like gender, sexual orientation, age, and religion. 

Take these two examples of how your leaders can be more inclusive: 

• Use inclusive language. Understanding the issues around person-first and identity-first language can help prevent individuals from feeling targeted or overlooked. Also, being observant of the preferred terms of individuals belonging to different races and ethnicities can contribute to a more inclusive and respectful environment.[7]

• Be held accountable. Create metrics for assessing your leaders on their commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace for immigrants. This means using quotas, tracking immigrant turnover rates, and implementing other KPIs to support inclusion. 

4. Create employee resource groups to support immigrant employees

Providing a platform for immigrant employees to connect, share experiences, and benefit from peer mentorship enhances their sense of belonging. On top of this, it can contribute to their professional development within the organization.

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are internal organizations that are voluntarily run by employees. They bring together people with similar challenges, hopes, and interests. You can set up ERGs for employees with similar backgrounds, professional goals, and even hobbies.

So whether you have a number of immigrants from the same region on your team or a group of employees who want to share their favorite recipes, creating ERGs gives them a way to bond and feel personally connected to their coworkers. 

5. Collaborate with immigrant support organizations and community groups

Immigrant support groups like Casa Latina, which provides free English language classes for immigrant workers, can provide you with insights on how to better support your immigrant employees. These types of organizations also offer resources that can help you better integrate immigrants into your workplace. 

Other examples of groups that provide support to immigrants and can educate organizations looking to hire them include The Immigrant Learning Center and USAHello. These are both non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with a huge range of useful programs and resources for employees and employers.

6. Unlock immigrant potential with skills-based hiring

None of your strategies to accommodate immigrant employees in your workforce will be relevant if you aren’t able to access that talent in the first place.

However, traditional hiring practices that heavily emphasize qualifications, resumes, and academic backgrounds may overlook the valuable skills, experiences, and perspectives that immigrant candidates offer.

Skills-based hiring, though, lets you zoom in on what your organization and teams really need – in terms of hard and soft skills, practical experience, skills gaps, and personalities.

For a hiring process that’s more inclusive of immigrants, you could include different language tests to measure varying levels of proficiency in your skills-based assessments, as well as personality & culture tests and cognitive ability tests.

With this approach to hiring, you can find the problem solver your product team is looking for, the engineer your R&D department always wanted, or the multilingual data analyst your leadership team needs.

Hiring practices that focus on candidate suitability rather than their background bring other advantages, too.

For example, our research found that 84% of organizations using skills-based hiring increased diversity. Additionally, 88% of companies experienced a reduction in mis-hires, 82% had a reduction in time-to-hire, and 94% saw reduced cost-to-hire.

Enrich your teams with immigrant talent 

Immigrant talent pools are overflowing with specialist skills, fresh outlooks, and growth potential that could do wonders for your teams – but if your hiring practices and company culture present these talented candidates with too many hurdles, they’ll find their opportunity elsewhere.

By committing to creating an inclusive environment that welcomes and integrates immigrant employees, you can make a tangible difference in performance across your organization. 

To make that difference, though, it’s crucial to first identify the talent your business needs. 

Skills-based hiring allows you to hone the skills you're looking for, the characteristics you value most, and the cultural compatibility that aligns with your organization's values – regardless of a candidate's background or origin. This way you can make sure you’re always hiring the right candidate, no matter where they come from. 

Sources

1. “Key findings about U.S. immigrants.” (2020). Pew Research Center. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/

2. “The share of immigrant workers in high-skill jobs is rising in the U.S.” (2020). Pew Research Center.  Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/02/24/the-share-of-immigrant-workers-in-high-skill-jobs-is-rising-in-the-u-s/

3. “Diversity wins: How inclusion matters.” (2020). McKinsey. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters

4. “Research Shows Immigrants Help Businesses Grow. Here’s Why.” (2018). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://hbr.org/2018/10/research-shows-immigrants-help-businesses-grow-heres-why

5. “Why the Brain Doubts a Foreign Accent.” (2010). Scientific American. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brain-doubts-accent/

6. “Non-native accents and stigma: How self-fulfilling prophecies can affect career outcomes.” (2017). ScienceDirect. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482216300936

7. “Inclusive Language Guidelines.” (2021). American Psychological Association. Retrieved on September 7th, 2023. https://www.apa.org/about/apa/equity-diversity-inclusion/language-guidelines