Online Recruitment in China

By Frank Mulligan ñ Accetis International, Talent Software & Recruit China

Onrecís recent foray into Asia was a resounding success with a good mixture of both internal HR practitioners and external 3rd party vendors in attendance at the Online Recruitment in China Conference in Hong Kong last week. (I should note that I was one of the presenters but that in no way invalidates the success.)

The format was light and intimate, with the Onrec CEO, David Hurst himself, leading the charge, and keeping all the speakers on-time and in-time. This left plenty of time for the exchanging of business cards. You could almost see potential opportunities being seized as the different players did the meet ën greet routine. The buzz was palpable and reflects the huge opportunities that exist in China, and Hong Kong. We are clearly on a cusp here.

My take-outs from the event were:

- Recruitment advertising is going local and niche. Hans van Beek from the Saon Group led us through the minefield of Chinaís recruitment advertising industry, which has turnover of about RMB6 billion per annum right now. Any percentage share of this is going to be a nice respectable figure.

- With annual growth rates of 15% there is something for everyone and the new sites in the market tend to cover niches that the broad portals (51job, Zhaopin, ChinaHR) cannot effectively cover.

- Surprisingly, the newspaper advertising market is still larger than the online market in China, according to van Beek. However, he points out that the cost of newspaper advertising is disproportionate to that of the online method, so the actual volume of advertisements is greater in the online space.

- According to his research, the main reason cited for using online advertising were volume of CVs, time efficiency and low cost.

- Amy Malakunas from Career International introduce the topic of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) in China. This is a subject dear to my own heart so I was happy to see someone present on it professionally, and take the lead in introducing the concept to potential buyers.

- For Amy, RPO is full-cycle recruiting from open requisition to on-boarding, recruitment process re-engineering and transformation, Vendor Management and technology and data management. Underlying this are multi-year contracts with specific commitments in the form of a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

- With that issue out of the way Amy showed how increasing reliance on external search vendors is driving recruitment costs to incredible highs in China. Additionally, China has a phenomenal growth and hunger for talent, especially quality talent.

- Turnover rates are very high in China and the likelihood of your staffing team or even HRM leaving within the next 6 ñ 12 months is high. This is an issue that all companies in China have to face, and it makes it difficult to rely on HR in any serious way.

- Companies are looking for ways to reduce recruitment cycle time. Outsourcing transactional elements of the recruitment processes enables them to do so. Companies also have no way of understanding their recruitment status or improving their process because they are decentralized.

- HR is facing demanding hiring managers that expect candidates quickly and within a reasonable budget. RPO solves this issue.

- Leong Kwong Yee from SHL, asked a WYSIWYG question ìIs what you see what you get?î. He showed how the internet is revolutionising the taking of psychometric tests, or any other test for that matter.

- Using some analogies that we could all relate to, Leong illustrated the value of various methods of assessing staff.

- He showed that the predictive quality of unstructured interviews is about as strong as the linkage between media violence and actual violence ie. not very strong. Using years of education as your measure of a potential new employee is about as valid as the linkage between using aspirin and reducing heart attacks. Surprisingly, for many of us, there is little correlation.

- Believe it or believe it not, the ëcorrectí comparison for personality questionnaires is with the efficacy of Viagra. Yes, he said Viagra, and we all gained very immediate knowledge of how effective personality questionnaires actually are. (The pictures in your mind are your own business.) This is a lot clearer than telling us that personality questionnaires and performance have a correlation factor of 0.4.

- Leong then went into considerable details on test cheating and how best to avoid it. He showed how online testing has built in safeguards such as cheat resistant tests, randomised question banks, verification procedures and data forensics.

- Fanny Chan, of the Sing Tao News Corporation, then gave us a run through regarding the transition that her company has had to make to adapt to the new online environment.

- This took the form of a new recruitment advertising site called Headlinejobs.hk which was the companyís response to the challenges posed by free newspapers, declining circulation, the emergence of online job advertising and the opportunities presented by Hong Kongís recent economic revival.

- The company has launched the site with an interesting new matching technology called Redmatch. This software uses a very sophisticated matching algorithm that Business Week has called ëscary competition for Monster.comí

- The Redmatch technology appears to match candidates with qualified jobs through matching profiles, applicant preferences and job requirements, instead of using certain keywords selected by the applicant. Itís mainly in use in recruitment portals but it has obvious applicability in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

All in all the Onrec was well worth the time and the effort to get to Hong Kong. I have only been able to give you a summary. The details of the presentations, and the relationships developed, are where the value is to be found.

For that you will have to make the trip to Hong Kong next year.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com