When BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, announced it was setting up a new office in Budapest this year, with 500 open positions, it was inundated by applicants from an unlikely place: London. Those interested in leaving Europe’s top banking center for Hungary made up a third of aspirants, says Melanie Seymour, BlackRock’s managing director in Budapest. At a get-together the company hosted at its London office in late January to promote the jobs, she says, so many senior investment bankers and other top-earning Hungarians attended that the after-work event stretched into the evening. As London braces for a post Brexit talent exodus, Central and Eastern Europe are preparing for an influx. Following years of brain drain, when elite graduates fled ex-communist nations for higher paying jobs in the West, the region now has more to offer. According to the Association of Business Service Leaders (ABSL), a trade group with offices across Central and Eastern Europe, the number of finance, legal, research, and design jobs in business-service centers in the region will more than triple, to 1 million, from 2015 to 2025. Employers include Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Poland and Pfizer Inc. in the Czech Republic. “Their ultimate dream is to come home,” says Seymour about Eastern Europeans who left to work in London. “The only reason they’re not here is because there aren’t the career opportunities to satisfy their intelligence and career ambitions.”

Questions for Discussion

1. Explain the global forces that have influenced companies’ decisions to set up offices in Central and Eastern Europe. 

2. How does the concept of national culture come into play when workers decide to stay in their home country? 

3. With the jobless rate at an all-time low in several Eastern European countries, what can managers do to retain top talent there? 

4. Although it’s too early to predict the impact of Brexit on global business, how can companies use the UK’s impending departure from the EU to their competitive advantage?