Recruiting in China

JOB seekers have a new way to find vacancies with the emergence of Zhi Ke (Job Key) on the Internet, allowing well-connected people to make money by finding positions.

Several Websites featuring Job Keys have appeared, mostly since July last year.

Operators get their cut from the online trading platform, and are tapping into a strong demand: hundreds of thousands of Chinese are now surfing the net in search for better paid positions.

Job Keys, many of whom are professionals at headhunting firms, can get 70 percent of the money once their reference lands the applicants their desired positions. The rest is kept by the Website as its commission.

While these Websites are not reaping huge profits, it will take time to see whether they can seriously compete with professional job Websites which offer free job information to individuals and rely fees from companies posting vacancies.

But it's good news for job seekers as there have been many cases where people have found better positions.

"What we want to do is to complement the current channels that job seekers use, given that it's becoming difficult for many of them to find the right place, especially university

graduates,'' said Zhou Changqing, general manager of Facejob.cn, a Beijing-based Job Key site.

China began to expand university recruitment in 1999 to improve the overall level of citizens' education background. But this led to the number of college graduates reaching record highs, creating a tough, competitive environment for those seeking employment.

Adding to their difficulty is many students are graduating from their chosen majors only to find the job market has changed since they picked the so-called "hot courses,'' which were expected to land them good jobs.

Zhou said college graduates had not yet emerged as loyal customers, although some had made offers up to 50,000 yuan (US$6,849) for a good job in Beijing.

Total offers on Facejob now are worth 8.86 million yuan, from about 5,600 job seekers, mostly with three years' working experience. Meanwhile, it has nearly 2,000 registered Job Keys, according to Zhou.

The most sought-after jobs on the site are entrance level ones, such as secretarial, administrative support and sales staff.

They are priced usually at about 2,000 yuan apiece, as the site fee is generally based on their expected one month's salary.

While Zhou's site doesn't require job seekers to deposit their offered money in advance to encourage users to register, Zkeer.com, also Beijing-based, does.

"It's a common practice for Witkey Websites to receive the money before achieving the task,'' said Gong Deping, founder of Zkeer.

The Job Key, indeed, is a specialized model of Witkey, or Wei Ke in Chinese, which allows users to sell their knowledge, information and ideas online, and enjoys greater

popularity than Job Key.

Yang Kexi, a spokesman for Taskcn.com which is China's leading Witkey site, said job references account for only a small percentage of their business.

"We believe that the real advantage of the Witkey sites is to serve as an outsourcing platform for corporate users,'' he said.

"There are more job-related tasks at the beginning of our operation but it seems such tasks are not well received, for the prize is usually very small,'' Yang said.

The reason, probably, is there are tons of free vacancies on the professional human resource service Websites where competition is intense.

On ChinaHR.com, China's largest HR service site by sales, there are two million vacancies every day on average, which are available to 15.6 million registered users

for free. It charges the corporate users for posting jobs and consulting.

Officials with ChinaHR declined to comment on the Job Key sites, or whether they have found any of their employees doing part time for such sites.