Recruiting in China

In the fast paced hiring environment that we have in China right now, just having a career website will not make you a winner.

Not even close.

Research around the world shows that the United States has moved towards a near-complete adoption of online hiring among mid to large size firms. That¡¯s almost 100% of all serious competitors. In other countries the figures are lower but not significantly so. China also lags but again not seriously.

So at the same time as we are experiencing rising salaries and skills shortages in many industries in China, your competitors are beginning to adopt technologies and systems that improve their ability to source and evaluate good people. That makes it even more critical that companies in China use the web to compete for candidates attention.

Using some form of online hiring system can deliver a strong employment brand that attracts people, with an integrated approach that keeps them in inside your process. Your new Careers@ website is only the first part of this process and it no longer gives the advantage that it used to. ¡®First mover¡¯ advantage in this area was lost at least 4-5 years ago. But if you have not built one already you would need to start now.

First Steps

Your starting point could be to just list current vacancies in China but it would not be so complicated to include other countries.

An easy second step would be to provide pages on your company, its mission, its values, the culture, or some profiles of existing employees. You could also take this a little further and videotape existing staff. This is normally done in the form of a ¡®Day in the Life¡¯ series but you can do it any way you want.

The third, and hardest step, is to map out the hiring process that you want, and build an automated system to run it. This application is generally called an Applicant Tracking System(ATS) or a Talent Management System(TMS). Most of the Fortune 500 companies already have such a system but there is still time to gain advantage.

The opportunity to regain the advantage comes from the fact that a majority of companies are still using onlline hiring systems to just automate the existing, and bureacratic, hiring processes in their company. In China this is still very much the case because many of the international systems are adapted to the US and cannot support the unique environment in China.

But the real advantage of these online hiring systems is to redefine your hiring process so that you can maintain confidential relationships with excellent people in your industry or market. Over a long period of time. This would enable you to work toward just-in-time hiring and to focus on candidate quality, not quantity.

Many, many companies in China have not done this yet so it is still possible to take the lead, and get ¡®First Mover¡¯ advantage.

ASPIRING entrepreneurs now have access to an innovative, government-funded course with practical tuition on starting their own business ventures.

The course, which started at Shanghai University yesterday, will feature a series of lectures teaching students how to discover opportunities, and implement team-building, networking, marketing, investment and financing plans.

It is the result of a joint project between the Shanghai Technology Entrepreneurship Foundation for Graduates - a government-backed organization funding student companies - and local universities.

A group of renowned entrepreneurs from both home and abroad will be invited to share their own business-starting experiences with university students or Master of Business Administration candidates during the courses.

For instance, David Dan, former president of Intel China who has started the company D Square Transformation Consulting, gave the first course session about business-starting opportunities in China to more than 50 Shanghai University MBA students yesterday.

Foundation officials said entrepreneurs' sharing their real-life experiences made the course stand out from similar courses run by other universities.

"We came to be aware that business-starting is a totally different practice in which hands-on experience is a must," said Li Jun, a foundation official.

Li said the Ministry of Education started the country's business-starting education effort at nine domestic universities in 2002. But the training was less than effective because most of the courses were taught by academics.

Blackstone Names Andrew Kuo Managing Director and Vice Chairman of Greater China

October 22, 2007: 08:20 AM EST

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Investment firm Blackstone Group LP said Monday it named Andrew Kuo its managing director and vice chairman of its Greater China division.

Kuo will primarily work on sourcing and managing private equity deals, but will assist other business divisions in the region as well.

"His experience in both direct investment and investment banking will be very useful to us as Blackstone expands its Asian franchise," Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Prior to joining Blackstone, Kuo worked as managing director and head of Greater China for private equity firm H&Q Asia Pacific.

HONG KONG: Hiring by multinationals in major Asian markets is likely to accelerate in the fourth quarter, notably in Japan, a survey by executive recruitment firm Hudson shows.

Sixty-five per cent of managers at multinationals in Japan said they expected to increase recruitment in the fourth quarter, according to the survey released on Thursday, up from 60 per cent in a survey taken three months earlier.

In China, 64 per cent of respondents plan to increase headcount this quarter, up from 60 per cent in the previous quarter; in Hong Kong 54 per cent of managers expect to add staff, compared with 49 per cent in the last survey.

The survey by Chicago-based Hudson Highland Group Inc covered responses from 2,500 managers at multinational companies across industry sectors in China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.

Expectations in Singapore remained unchanged from the previous survey, with 54 percent of managers seeing a need to hire more staff.

Fast economic growth has led to a shortage of executive talent in Asia. More than a third of employees in Hong Kong and Singapore leave a company within two years, according to the Hudson report.

In China, 52 per cent of staff leaves within two years, and 30 per cent of job candidates there are demanding salaries of more than 20 per cent above what employers are willing to pay, the survey shows.

CHINESE Mainland employees spend the shortest time in employment with employers than other workers in major Asian job markets, a survey released yesterday reveals.

Among the 673 respondents surveyed on the Chinese mainland, about 52 people said that they had worked for each employer for less than two years, most of them spending between 19 to 24 months.

Workers who spent less than two years in a position accounted for only 28 percent of those surveyed in Japan and 35 percent in Hong Kong and Singapore.

The survey, conducted by Hudson Recruitment, asked nearly 2,500 decision makers in multinational corporations in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore about their hiring and staff retention.

Media, public relations and advertising firms reported the shortest average staff tenure with 84 percent of their employees leaving the job in two years or less, while only two percent stayed in the one place for more than three years.

Other sectors such as banking, consumer, information technology and manufacturing followed, the report said.

Angie Eagan, Hudson's general manager in Shanghai, said that the high turnover was brought by a continuous shortage of skills in Chinese mainland.

"People always want a bigger salary and they will keep looking for opportunities," Eagan said, adding that the high level of head hunting made it easy for employees to hop from job to job.

A reader's toolbox:

Adequate financial planning does not imply heavy foreign exchange or getting buried in stock trading. An individual should know about mutual funds and the edge of hedge funds over them. Keeping information about stock brokerage is totally up to an individual.

Duncan Mavin, Financial Post
Published: Thursday, October 04, 2007

In China's red-hot recruitment market, business professionals are desperate to get ahead of the competition, with qualifications and overseas experience among the most sought after resume credentials.

'Returnees,' Chinese workers who have spent several years honing their business skills abroad, often have their pick of the best jobs, as does any Chinese executive with foreign training.

It's a trend that is leading to a wealth of opportunities for Canadian organizations able to provide the right kind of training.

"It's still a small part of our business, but it's been growing nicely in the past three years," says Roberta Wilton, chief executive officer of CSI, the Canadian Securities Institute.

At Toronto City Hall in August, for instance, twenty-eight Chinese executives became the latest graduates of the Canadian Securities Institute.

The business students from Guangfa Securities, a full-service securities firm based in Gaungzhou, China, graduated from a two-month course organized by CSI in conjunction with the Securities Association of China.

Hundreds of financial professionals from China have participated in CSI's executive style training programs in the past couple of years.

But it isn't the only organization to spot the opportunity.

Ads for the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business are impossible to miss in Hong Kong, where they are plastered all over subways and other prominent places.

The Ivey school has a modern campus in Hong Kong -- with a high-profile location in the heart of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre -- and another office in Beijing, as well as alumni associations in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Schools from all over the world are catching on fast, says Pete Fiaschi, the head of international marketing at Newcastle College, a vocational school in the northeast of England that focuses on the business of arts, tourism and sports.

Toronto-born Mr. Fiaschi spends most of the summer months travelling through China, including to relatively unknown cities such as Fuzhou or Qingdao, recruiting 200 or so Chinese students whose fees are a significant source of income for the school. In July, he set up permanent regional offices in Beijing and in Dalian, in northern China, to deal with the growing competition for Chinese students.

CSI, too, has a permanent office in Beijing and is about to open a Shanghai office. It also has partnerships with Chinese universities, including the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

There is competition among foreign training providers, says Ms. Wilton. In particular, many of the big foreign banks and securities firms offer training courses, as do the international consulting and accounting firms.

CSI is betting its North American perspective plus its access to trainers from a variety of real live businesses gives it an edge over some more academic institutions as well as companies that can only provide insight from one industry.

Offering courses jointly with the Chinese regulator also helps build credibility, which will lead to deeper inroads in China, says Ms. Wilton.