Recruiting in China

A project was launched in Beijing on Friday aiming to build employer brands by naming China's "top employers" in a new publication and on TV.

The China Top Employers project was also launched in Shanghai in May by the Corporate Research Foundation (CRF), a Netherlands-based independent publishing company.

"Its format is unique in China. It aims to help companies build an employer brand," said Cai Rong, chief representative of CRF China. She added the project is currently active in nine countries.

Jobseekers, MBAs, EMBAs and graduates returning from overseas will be able to get information about companies selected by the CRF through books and TV shows.

"But each company has to pass a rigorous selection process to become one of the 'top employers' in China," Cai said.

After registering, companies complete a questionnaire and a CRF journalist interviews one of their senior human resources managers and two employees from the firm.

"Our questions vary from country to country and region to region covering a wide area from salary, welfare and corporate culture," Cai said. She added questions for each region are designed by a panel comprising experts from human resources companies, universities and the media.

"The information provided by the questionnaire is fully confidential and will be used to evaluate the participant and generate benchmark data," she said.

The CRF determines whether a company meets the minimum criteria to become one of China's "top employers," determining the top three reasons to work for the firm and a confidential report.

If a company fails the final selection and publication, all research material and CRF reports are returned. The whole process is then free of charge.

If the participating company is selected as one of China's "top employers," the company profile as written by a CRF journalist is submitted to the firm. Companies are only able to make factual changes to the text.

The companies will be listed in a book, which is to be directly delivered to jobseekers. The book describes the advantages of the companies through information gleaned from the interviews.

"We will also take them (the selected companies) to seminars and TV shows to discuss with young talents issues concerning employer branding," Cai said.

Companies are charged US$5,800 in Shanghai and US$7,800 in Beijing to cover research, writing, editorial, production and marketing costs.

The programme attracted 48 companies in Shanghai, including DHL, Alibaba, China Mobile and Home Inns. Thirty-eight have been selected as China's Top Employers for 2007.

But Cai said domestic companies only make up a tiny proportion of the firms about 10 per cent of the total.

"We hope Chinese companies will attach more significance to building an employer brand," she said.

The concept of employer brand was put forward by Western enterprises. Human resources departments play an important role in Western companies, but this is not the case in China.

"Human resources directors are not given enough rights in China and some roles that should belong to the department are played by other departments," Cai said. "China's human resources departments always remain at the operational level rather than at the strategic level."

In many Chinese companies human resources departments are responsible for recruiting but not for retaining people. For this reason job turnover in Chinese companies is two to three times higher than in Europe.

Cai said it is also an initiative that drove them to bring the project to China

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