Recruiting in China

By Mr Wallacy Gao

Mr Wallacy Gao, CEO of Career International, one of the most important chinese recruitment agencies, shares his vision of the trends and stakes of the recruitment industry today in his home country.

What is the actual shape of the recruitment market in China?
What you have to understand first is that twenty years ago there was no recruiting market in China. The government allocated all jobs. Then, when China began to embrace free enterprise, the local recruitment market started to develop. But at that time, employers still mainly used referrals and job fairs as sourcing channels: they were the traditional government channels.
Suddenly, after 1990, there was a rapid rise in the number of job seekers, and at that time, new sourcing channels appeared. Today, job seekers can choose between many different channel types as Online recruiting, executive search agency, news papers, job fairs ect.
Not only foreign ventures, but also local HR service companies face a booming market. To use a popular Chinese expression to describe a market with such a great potential, I would say that the recruiting market in China is quite a "big cake." I believe the size of China¡¯s recruiting market will reach to over $1 billion in 2006.

How did the first recruitment agencies appear?
Once the Chinese door have been opened on the outside world, the big cities and business centers as Beijing or Shanghai have quickly attracted foreign companies -- giant corporations as well as small start-ups. All those companies need to recruit, and so need professional HR agencies to help them source their ideal personnel and build their Chinese HR structure. This is how we first met these clients.
That was specially the case for small "start-up companies", for which competition increased quickly. In the same time, skills and abilities were hard to find. They needed professional recruiting experts to help them improving management team¡¯s quality.

What are the key success factors for non-Chinese multinationals when they start recruiting in China?
First of all, multinational should know that attitude is the vital thing when they start recruiting in China.
Then, they should be prepare to face real shortage of candidates in certain circumstances. Sometimes the war for talent is as fierce as in many parts of the Western countries, although China has a population of 1.3 billion people. Most foreign companies entering into China, have been surprised to find that managers were particularly hard to find.
I think there are four points playing a key role in the success of non-Chinese multinationals when they start recruiting in China:

Get professional recruiting staff in their HR department. That¡¯s very important for a foreign company in China.
Get an effective vendor management system.
Deploy perfect Recruiting tools.
Implement an Internal staffing inspiriting process system.
Is the using of a recruiting technology a good option when recruiting in China?
Yes. Certainly it is.
As skilled managers are in particularly short supply on the Chinese market, attracting good ones can present a special challenge. The truth is that recruiting for any position in China can require a whole new outlook. Usually, recruiters in HR department always aim to decrease costs and increase recruiting quality. For that, an excellent recruiting technology is the vital thing for making the difference and recruits the right staff.
That is why we promote Talent Management Solutions to companies in China.

What is your assessment of the added value brought by recruitment technologies on the Chinese market?
Using Recruitment Technologies, especially when associated with Process Outsourcing, can help recruiters decrease costs and increase working efficiency. For example, in a traditional model, a recruiter has to take a lot of time to filtering resumes from the Internet, mails, job fairs ect. The follow up of candidates¡¯ interviews with line managers is also very time demanding. Recruitment technologies can help recruiters save more time and more money.

What is your vision of the future of recruitment in China?
It is a difficult question: the major fact about our market is its capcaity to change and evolve in a fast fast way. Tomorow can be a totally different thing. Still, I think that in the future, the evolution of the recruitment market in China will be driven by three important sectors:

The quality of candidates
The ability to build efficient recruiting processes,
The ability to integrate technology