Recruiting in China

ChinaHR was up for sale by its largest shareholder Monster Worldwide Inc. (NYSE: MWW) in early November. But so far no company is willing to take over ChinaHR.

According to the company’s third quarter financial report, Monster’s operating revenue in the third quarter has significantly decreased by 10.5 percent and the company suffered a net loss of $194.2 million, of which ChinaHR contributes $233 million - partially offset by Monster’s other more lucrative holdings.

In fact, ChinaHR is not the only online recruitment company trapped in a slump in China. Data from iResearch reveals that three Chinese online recruitment giants – 51job.com, zhaopin.com and ChinaHR.com, all suffered from decreasing visitors for the first time since 2011.

The mostly homogenous services provided by online recruitment companies are losing power to attract clients with the growth of social networking websites.

According to the Global Employees Index published by Kelly Services, 80 percent of Chinese employees visit social networking websites everyday, 21 percent of which are using these networks to look for jobs.

At present, the platform gathering the most global professional talent is the business networking website LinkedIn, founded at the end of 2002 and publicly listed in 2011. Now it hosts 187 million registered users and 109 million unique visitors per month.

The LinkedIn pattern was copied by large numbers of Chinese professional networking websites after its successful IPO, including wealink.com, tianji.com, dajie.com and wolonge.com.

“Among so many professional networking websites, it’s difficult to judge who will win the appreciation of most users at the moment,” said one analyst.

It was reported that the registered users on professional networking websites have exceeded 70 million and is expected to reach 100 million in three months.

The number of Chinese professionals is huge and is rapidly growing with the development of economy. However, the vertical social service platforms targeting professionals are still in the initial stages, said Han Hui, CEO wolonge.com.

Traditional online recruitment cannot solve the information gap between recruiting companies and job seekers, while professional networking websites can provide a platform for them to know each other more and to respect each other

L'Oreal China on Thursday opened an academy in Shanghai for training and developing talent in the cosmetics industry in order to promote sustained business growth in the world's most populous country.

Occupying a total area of 3,300 square meters of a seven-story building in the city center, the training center has 20 classrooms that can accommodate a total of 600 students taking classes at the same time.

The center integrates training with education, and it is devoted to the development of talent in all cosmetics-related jobs, including beauty advisors, hair stylists, skin care advisors, salespersons and managers.

The center will serve all four business divisions and 20 of L'Oreal China's best-known brands. The center plans to train 17,000 hairdressers in the coming year, according to an initial company estimate.

L'Oreal has a history of commitment to talent development. The company's leadership said it hopes to maintain high-quality human resources via various types of training, which will lay a solid foundation for the company's future growth.

Alexis Perakis-Valat, CEO of L'Oreal China, said it is important to not only focus on market share and other metrics of business success but to also pay close attention to talent development.

"Talent is a valuable asset to us. The establishment of this training center is one of the most important steps we have taken in China. It caters to the need of business development and is evidence of our confidence and promise of sustainable development in the Chinese market," he said.

The establishment of the center is one more piece of the puzzle for L'Oreal as it continues to grow its China business.

Since it entered the Chinese market in 1997, L'Oreal has managed to achieve steady double-digit growth for 11 consecutive years. It generated more than 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in total sales in China last year, further consolidating the country's role as one of the three most important markets for the entire group.

L'Oreal has about 3,000 employees in China. With two plants, one management development center, an Asia-Pacific operation center and a state-of-the-art research and innovation center dedicated to Chinese and other Asian consumers, it is one of the few multinational companies possessing R&D, production, logistics and human resources development facilities in the country.

BEIJING: The Chinese government today said it has created 12.02 million new jobs in the first 11 months of this year surpassing the goal of 9 million.

The urban registered unemployment rate stood at 4.1 per cent at the end of September, below the annual target of 4.6 per cent, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) said.

The employment situation has been better than expected this year amid the backdrop of slowing global economic recovery and downward pressures weighing on the domestic economy, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Human Resources Minister Yin Weimin as saying.

Meanwhile, massive layoffs have also been rare this year, as a continuous labour shortage left employers more prudent about staff cuts, Zhou added.

Yin said the focus of next year's work will still be employment for college graduates, an expanding population that has hit 6.8 million this year.

China will carry out and improve policies in support of the employment and entrepreneurship of college graduates, expand their employment areas and introduce public recruitment services to campuses, Yin said.

To boost employment, the government also vowed to support the development of small and micro enterprises and strengthen social responsibility among large enterprises at the conference held on December 15 and 16.

China's total urban population in search of employment reached 25 million in 2012, far exceeding the 12 million new jobs created annually in recent years, data show.

Analysts have pointed out that in addition to the pressure to create more jobs, there is a notable gap between the skills of the unemployed and the skills required for certain positions.

Most industries in China are currently facing a serious shortage of skilled workers. The manufacturing sector alone, according to the MHRSS, is in need of about 4 million senior technicians.

Interviewees are in general management roles including CEOs and COOs:

79% of the respondents see a shrinking gap of compensation package between expat and local executives.

70% noticed a change in the type of expatriate workers that China is attracting - expatriates are now younger and from more diverse nations.

71% now believe it is harder for foreign-born executives working in China to gain access to local executive positions.

42% cited "employers favor local talent" as the most inhibiting factor to finding an executive job in China.

60% of the surveyed expatriates think employers would prefer to use less skilled local people to avoid paying an expatriate compensation package.

51% are actively looking for a new opportunity.

The survey was conducted by the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

iPhone 5 factory in a bad way

Claims by Apple and Foxconn that they had fixed the labour problems have turned out to be spin, according to a French expose by Envoyé Spécial.

Journalists from the public TV station France 2 went undercover at the Zhengzhou iPhone 5 Foxconn factory.

The programme, which is sort of a French Panorama, found many of the same problems the Chinese manufacturer and Apple promised to fix earlier this year.

According to Engadget, the report uncovers a nightmare of working conditions. Workers were forced to stay in partly built dorm rooms that had no elevators, electricity or running water.

A Foxconn manager was filmed warning workers not to plug devices into dorms that did have electricity, saying that eight workers were killed in a fire after overloading circuits.

Hacks interviewed lower-paid student employees who were of legal age to work there but were essentially slave labour. Corrupt school administrators told them they'd lose their diplomas if they didn't take a job at the plant.

Regular workers also claimed that much of their upgraded $290 monthly salary was still being absorbed by the company through housing, insurance and food charges.

Envoyé Spécial found that Foxconn had methods of clawing back wages from employees. These included a $7 for a psychological test supposed to weed out suicidal candidates. Foxconn does not pay, but workers did.

Foxconn is under pressure from Apple to turn out shedloads of the shiny toys to keep the wealthy and clueless of the world happy.

One employee said it is so difficult to meet the quota, the company has to recruit all the time to stem the turnover of frustrated workers.

Foxconn didn't discuss the above findings with French reporters on camera but has since admitted that it was not perfect.

It said that the company was making progress and was a market leader in meeting the needs of the new generation of workers in China.

Apple told Envoyé Spécial that its subcontractors were required to provide safe working conditions, dignity and respect to employees.

Apple said that it insisted all of its suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever its products are made.

However, neither Apple nor Foxconn seemed keen to have another round of investigations at the new plant.

China's Labor Market Report 2012 just released in Beijing shows a large number of university students left campus without finding a job in the past decade. Experts believe that unversity recruitment expansion is not the cause of high unemployment among graduates. Boosting education reform and adjusting demand and supply in the labor market is the key to the solution.

The expansion of college recruitment started in 1999 when 1.6 million students were admitted to universities and colleges in China that year. The figure was 50 percent higher than the previous year.

After that, the student recruitment scale kept growing at a fast pace; in 2012, more than 68 million students entered universities and colleges.

Since 2002, the year when the first batch of students in the recruitment expansion period graduated, to 2012, more than 47 million college students graduated and entered the labor market. Their skill and knowledge effectively enhanced the general level of the labor force. Statistics show that less than 5 percent of the labor force in the year 2000 had received a higher education, this figure reached more than 10 percent in 2010.

However, the Dean of Chinese Academy of Personnel Science Wu Jiang says the rate of employees with a higher education in the Chinese labor market still lags behind other countries.

"This rate is far from sufficient. The figure in some countries already reached about 20 percent in 2005. We hope to achieve this goal in 2020."

Analysis indicates that if there were no college recruitment expansion, the pressure in the labor market may come more from the low-end market. It's hard to imagine what influence a large scale low-end labor market would have on the country in terms of the economy and family life.

In spite of the improvements, the first time employment rate among college graduates remain low. Figures show that from 2002 to 2012, more than 30 percent of the college graduates failed to find jobs before they graduate. That is to say, more than 1 million college graduates are unemployed every year.

The Labor Market Report 2012 also points out that among those unemployed, 40 percent are students of law, economic management, accounting, business and foreign trade. But 90 percent of the students majoring in science and technology, medical science, agriculture, education are employed following graduation.

Tang Min, counselor at China State Council says education reform is one of the key causes.

"The biggest problem is our education reform didn't follow up. A significant amount of students have a hard time in catching up the changes in the society and our universities failed to give them sufficient base knowledge to tackle the changes."

Dean of Economic Management Institute of Beijing Normal University Lai Desheng believes that the recruitment expansion should not be blamed for the college graduates' high unemployment rate.

The report also points out that there is a regional imbalance in the labor market because students prefer larger cities.

Xie Ying, is the director of medical reform team at a medical bureau in Bijie, a low income city in Guizhou Province.

"Most college graduates choose to work in bigger cities like Guiyang or Zunyi, rather than Bijie. Some students whose hukou, or residency permit, is here choose to come back to Bijie but there are very few who would like to work here."

The China Labor Market Report 2012 figures show that in the past 10 years, only 12 percent of the new graduates are willing to work in rural areas, and no big change has been seen in the rate since 2002.

Despite the fact that economic development in China's less developed mid- and western areas has improved in recent years, more than 50 percent of the graduates still choose to work in the east where the economy is better developed. Students who possessed master's and doctor's degree will spare no effort to find employment in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. This phenomenon remains prevalent.

Popular employment choices for graduates are education, public management, social organization and manufacturing. Information industry, media, real estate and commercial services are also popular.