Recruiting in China

Zhaopin.com Announces China’s Top 10 Most Popular Employers for Graduates. (PRNewsFoto/Zhaopin.com)

BEIJING, Dec. 13, 2013 /Emag.co.uk/ — The Zhaopin.com China Best Employer Award 2013 (best.zhaopin.com), co-organized by Zhaopin.com, China’s largest recruitment site, and Peking University’s Corporate Social Responsibility and Employer Brand Communication Research Center, successfully came to a conclusion in Sanya, Hainan province’s capital, also known as China’s Deer City. Zhaopin.com CEO Evan Guo said in his speech at this “Academy Awards” of China’s human resource industry, that he believes that 2014, with the number of graduates spilling out of China’s colleges and universities during the year expected to reach 7.27 million, will be an even more difficult year for job seekers than 2013, a year that had already been considered the most difficult year for employment so far.

(Photo: During 2013, Zhaopin.com joined hands with CCTV in organizing a public-benefit event, Graduates Seeking Employment 2013, with the aim of building China’s largest public platform for the job prospects of university graduates and with the goal of improving social awareness of the plight of college students, in the hope of helping more graduates find suitable positions. “Although the event was purely for the public good, during it we were rewarded for our faith and accomplished the lofty mission of helping thousands of graduates step into society,” Guo said. In the summer of 2013, the “Graduates Seeking Employment” platform ran announcements for 117,389 jobs seeking Chinese college graduates, and one in 100 graduates on average found a job via the platform. In 2014, Zhaopin.com looks forward to working with more companies to offer jobs in an even more difficult employment environment, and expects China Best Employers to play a leading role in the effort.

In China, college students are known as the “favored.” They not only shoulder the hope of the nation, but also are of extraordinary importance to the country’s human resources sector. Today, as China’s HR market shifts to a seller’s market and the population ages, the group of college graduates mainly consisting of the post-90s becomes the vital workforce. Compared to the post-70s and the post-80s, the post-90s generation brings a different perspective to the best employers, and these perspectives will provide important reference points for leveraging the experience of these employers in building leading brands. These factors were the key data points in determining the winner of Zhaopin.com’s China Best Employer Award 2013.

The Zhaopin.com “China Best Employer” report showed that Chinese undergraduates now no longer consider the salary and benefits package as one of the primary factors when looking at all the data points in a prospective employer’s profile. The survey data revealed that “Organizational Management” with 20.6 percent of votes overtook “Salary and Benefits Package” for the first time as the top criterion. This demonstrated that under the growing pressure from the increasingly competitive job market, the undergraduates considered self-improvement as a priority rather than exclusively focusing on material conditions, in a move to be more competitive in the future job market. These findings sound a warning to any employer who is still consider offering competitive salary and benefits packages as the solution to attract top talent rather than improving the quality of their organization.

The report also signaled that there were significant changes in what different types of companies considered their priorities, with one of the obvious trends being that young undergraduates are trying to compete based on their family background. According to the 2013 survey findings, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are falling in attractiveness, with the number of undergraduates willing to work at an SOE declining by over 8 percent from the 2012 results, although undergraduates are more willing to work in state-owned and foreign-funded companies. Foreign-funded companies are becoming more popular among Chinese undergraduates.

Another interesting finding is that under the growing stress of both life and work, undergraduates now no longer prefer to work exclusively in the most developed cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Less than 40 percent of undergraduates surveyed expressed their willingness to work in these three cities, much lower than the percentage in previous Zhaopin.com “China Best Employer” reports. Chinese companies need to pay attention to the high housing prices, long work hours, traffic congestion and air pollution in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou that are forcing more than just undergraduates to want to avoid and get away from these cities.

These findings revealed the obvious changes in criteria that undergraduates apply to the decision making process as they choose what they consider to be the best place to work. The focus on non-material factors among young and sensible undergraduates when considering job opportunities shows the positive trend in the human resources sector across China and in Zhaopin.com’s brand building achievements. Zhaopin.com “2013 Top Employers Gaining Most Attention from Undergraduates” survey is expected to offer more successful brand building cases.