Recruiting in China

I found today that chinahr.com officially added monster.com link to its front page. This maybe a very natural thing after chinahr.com's majority shares were aquired by Monster.com last year. I checked Monster.com homepage and found china and korea are added to the geo choices.

This move is still a very interesting thing to me:

1) It seems to me that both China and Korea monster sites are now established by acquiring local job board. Other Asian monster sites including HK, Singapore and India - all of them are English sites and bear same look and feel as rest of Monster sites. Language seems still a barriar even to the big player like Monster, so buying an establish local job sites seems much easier and cheaper than building them from scrach.

2) While the 2 new added sites (China and Korea) seems still using their own databases and can not directly link to the rest Monster databases worldwide. So I still have to buy seperate corporate accounts as an agent if I REALLY want to seach cross regions. I don't know how Monster gonna solve the problem.

e.g. If I purchase a HK monster account including region - 'China', but the problem is it does not include new Monster China'd databases. The HK (or all Englissh Monster) database only has candidates registering directly to English Monster sites. While you are thinking buying a potential billion names, you can instead only access a few thousands people in that region. Crazy to think - where are the billion people? :)

I was excited initially to assume that I can now consolidate my job board accounts, but it seems that I have to maintain both accounts for a while. Converting two databases with different structures is no easy thing if not impossible. I will see how Monster will come up with any better idea to consolidate them.

TZ