Competition amongst employers in China is becoming ever more intense as the economy continues to grow and more firms enter the market. On top of that, inflation is now running at 11-12%, the highest levels seen in over a decade. This means there is now a constant pressure on employers to keep increasing salaries.
How to find the best staff and keep them
In many respects China is no different from the West when it comes to staff recruitment and retention. If you want to become an attractive employer in China, you’ll need to look beyond the pay cheque and understand what really makes Chinese employees tick.
Becoming an employer of choice will allow you to grow a loyal workforce that has faith in your leadership. It will also mean that you’re be better able to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arise and ride the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle.
Commenting on it’s annual survey of Best Employers in China for 2007, Human Resources firm Hewitt Associates found that:
”The Best Employers excel at making employees feel connected to the business. They communicate with employees about the organization’s goals. They align people with the business through performance management and aggressive career development. And they link pay with performance of the individual and the company.”
Looking beyond the paperwork
In Chinese Job hunting circles diplomas, degrees and certificates are objects of high worship.
Dating back to Imperial times in China, government jobs and promotions have traditionally placed great emphasis on certificates or a degrees of some kind. This culture still prevails in the modern world of commerce.
New graduates from elite universities such as Fudan or Tsinghua can expect at least double the salaries of their counterparts from ‘second tier’ universities – often much more. Similarly, holders of PhDs and Masters degrees have significantly higher salary expectations than those without.
What this means is that salary expectations of some employees may not really be commensurate with their value to you. When weighing candidates up, you should consider whether a graduate from one university really is worth 2 to 3 times as much as someone with a similar training from a less prestigious academy.
This is one area in particular, where careful attention to detail in the recruitment process may uncover real value for your company. By looking beyond the standard Chinese system of valuation, you may well find real talent that has been passed over by competitors.
And if hard measures of a future employee’s worth are really important to you, you may wish to consider alternatives such as psychological profiling, EIQ tests etc.
References are important
Academic fraud in China ranges from simple certificate forgery to ‘Qiangshou’, where people sit exams for others in exchange for a fee, to bribery.
Back in 2003 the China Daily reported on a study conducted by a recruitment firm which found that 800 out of a sample of 3,000 diplomas had been forged. It also revealed that a fake Harvard PhD certificate could be be bought for as little as $100
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-10/08/content_269943.htm
The Chinese government brought in tough measures to combat academic fraud several years ago. Nevertheless, it’s still worth checking the credentials of interviewees. These days most reputable educational establishments are able to verify certificates against a database for a small fee. Referees are not typically not offered on resumes. Nevertheless, applicants should be able to provide you with references on request.
Resumes and Interviews
Skill in preparing a compelling one page resume is not something you should expect from Chinese job applicants. They are more accustomed to filling in application forms than they are selling themselves in a free form document. However, an application form provides you with a good opportunity to ask searching questions and give applicants an idea of what you are really looking for.
Interviewers have also found that the recruitment process tends to be more successful if they tell applicants what qualities they are looking for ahead of the interview process. Providing a reasonably detailed job description will also prove helpful.
When interviewing Chinese it’s important to remember that it goes strongly against cultural norms to appear boastful at an interview. Interviewees will often be self effacing and reluctant to talk themselves up ‘American Style’. That means you’ll need to be far more alert to and responsive to subtle signals than you would when interviewing a westerner. Ideally you should allow a local to conduct, or at least participate in the interview process..
