David Hall, the newly appointed deputy director of human resources for People Supply, a global leader in the HR services business, headed to his first meeting with the CEO and his new boss, the HR director. Formerly the highly successful regional office manager of the company’s six branches in New York, Hall, 35, had just been moved to world headquarters in Frankfurt and asked to take on two roles: overseeing the HR specialist recruiting function in Germany (a line role in which he would work with the six German regional offices), and coordinating the cross-national movement of executives throughout the firm. In the latter, a staff role, Hall had been asked to look at the firm’s global workforce in order to find better solutions to its global mobility problem. Hall was certain that the company – an expert in sourcing talent for its clients – could do more in certain markets to source talent for itself. He wondered what it would take to coordinate such an effort on a global scale.
