by DANIELA ARCE
Nevermind that he couldn’t speak the language, or that he hardly knew anything about the Brazilian market. Two years ago, Felipe Leonard packed his bags and moved across the border from Argentina to Brazil. Originally on the payroll of an Argentine-Belgian company, Leonard later found a job with a firm called Grupo Gamma, where he currently works as a general manager.
“This country really intrigued me,” he says. “But other than the fact that it’s a monster of a country that’s galloping along, I didn’t know anything about Brazil.”
Leornard’s story isn’t all that unusual. Qualified executives capable of helping Brazil maintain its rapid growth are in high demand in the Latin American juggernaut, where direct foreign investment has increased by 38% since 2009, even as it dropped off worldwide by 24%, according to the International Monetary Fund. Goldman Sachs predicts that over the coming years, economic growth in the entire BRICS block will continue to outpace the world average. Besides Brazil, the BRICS group includes Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Not surprisingly, companies here are more interested than ever in attracting – and holding onto – talent. Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista, owner of the conglomerate EBX Group, is investing in a naval university in Rio de Janeiro in order to train engineers and managers for a massive port complex he’s building in the south of the country. The Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, meanwhile, is busy promoting itself to future executives via an ongoing series of conferences delivered at universities.
These companies have to “fill the worker shortage somehow, whether it means stealing people from competitors, looking for retired people or searching for people in Europe or elsewhere in Latin America,” explains Roberto Machado, a managing director with the recruitment firm Michael Page. “Each company has its own strategy depending on the sector. In the oil industry, for example, it’s easiest to find people in Houston, Angola or Venezuela.”
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