You are away from home and have begun to contemplate with the idea of a career move. You can either wait patiently for that elusive headhunter of integrity to surface and find you, or be active and submit your details across every online recruitment agency you happen to find, setting yourself to face all sorts of adventures.

As an expatriate you may be disturbed by the fact that by working internationally you have become unidentifiable to the recruitment loop and have ended up, according to employers and hiring agencies, "out of sight, out of mind".

Foreigners are somewhat left out of the loop of expat recruitment in Asia. To keep their chances alive at home it is strongly recommended that expats remain in touch with "friendly headhunters" back home. This isn't too tedious as most of the major recruitment companies have several international branches and are globally active. For many key places for expatriates, a headhunter's office on the ground is becoming more probable.

In the present scenario, expats simply need to be more pro-active. As expats in Asia, you require to keep recruiters up to date as to who you are, where you are employed, and what you are thinking, is the basic advice. People employed abroad have to be far more dedicated to finding their next job than if they were at home. Obviously it is harder to set up interviews if you are located abroad.

Besides, you are really required to do your research and realize what's going on in the market you are aspiring to move to. Or all that this advice is concrete, expats might shy away at the extra work involved. Life is already too fast-paced itself. One solution for this, which has been increasingly sought after in recent years, is internet recruitment.

In recent years, there has been a surge in internet-based companies for expat recruitment in Asia ranging from mid-level recruitment services that give opportunities for below-board-level executives to vast 'CV banks' that provide chances for millions of people looking to showcase their wares on a worldwide basis. There has been a three-fold rise in the utilization of commercial recruitment sites to plug senior vacancies over the past year.

Firms searching for job boards to discover directors, for instance, rose from 4 per cent to 13 per cent, and 72 per cent of them rated the practice a success compared with 54 per cent of the same time last year.

But this does not imply that online recruitment sites are blowing away more traditional methods. Researches found that companies are accessing the internet apart from traditional recruitment methods in order to spread the potential pool of candidates and cater for more applicants and not as a replacement.

The current state of the labor market proves that it is more and more difficult to attract the right candidates, specifically at higher levels. As a result, organizations are spreading the recruitment net as wide as possible so as to find the best people. Actually among the expats there is a hard core of about two in five employers who do not utilize the internet to recruit, and have no plans to do so. In reality, there remains a lot of caution and half-mindedness out there.

Some people are fed up with the internet, even though the technology is not older than a decade and still is very much immature. Therefore, if you have the right attitude, the chances are that you will attain what you set out for via expat recruitment in Asia.