In all I have heard a great deal from candidates of mine who (for whatever reason) read my blog and the reactions have been mixed.  It seems that at the highest levels options are seen to hold good value and be a great want to round out a package that is already well over US$ 150K per year.  At the lower levels of management options are viewed with more skepticism.  This will change with time and when employers and recruiters have more success stories to point to in the China talent market.  But it is still early and the following quote sums up my experience pretty well:

"Stock options don't really work with young people," explained one HR manager. "Saying we'll give it to you in five years doesn't fly. They want options and cash." Ongoing education about the value of stock options will likely increase their usefulness as a retention tool, particularly in the case of employees who have remained with a company for a few years and have seen the value of their stocks appreciate. 

(Brian Fenerty has experience recruiting in candidate-short markets in Asia, North, and South America.   For more insights specific to recruiting in China  please visit his blog at:  www.recruitinginchina.com.cn  - or visit Brian on LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfenerty )

It seems like such an easy quetion to answer but for many of our potential clients (and maybe some current ones) their strategy sounds more like a market summary than a plan of action: "It is hard to find good people." Beyond that there is often the usual discussions about how, when they do find people they often can't meet their salary requirements.  While tis is certainly telling and, to some degree, surmountable it is not a strategy.

The Problem:

The way I see it, today, right now, is that many firms are overwhelmed in China and are not able to segment their own hiring needs into manageable parts-of-a-whole that can be addressed individually.  While some postings are met with thousands of job seekers and the main task is that of screening, others are met with none and the third party recruiters are brought in for "more resumes."  This is the usual request for more candidates who match the job description of a position that is extemely hard to fill and may be open indefinatley. 

We don't have more resumes

We have search strategies, passive candidates, and recruiting processes.  These work best when they are meeting up with their counterpart at the client side.  They become downright useless when they are only used as a way to get "more resumes." 

Create a strategy

I was reading an artice about the talent shortage in the supply chain sector that mentioned that Coca Cola Bottling (not a client, yet) is looking at candidates that match the personality profile of the candidates for whom they are searching rather that the skill set.  Look here: http://www.supplychain.cn/en/art/?1673

"Ainsley Mann of Coca Cola Bottling disagrees with the idea that there is a talent shortage. "With recruitment, I think it's possible that we are looking at too narrow a field. Maybe we need to find people from other sectors that can be retrained for positions in logistics."

This is a strategy and when these candidates are met by the Coke recruiters they will not be screened out as having the wrong experience because they will understand they are looking for this type of person!  An elegant solution that is all to unusual in China at the moment.

So what?

So if you are having trouble finding candidates in China for a specific role and are ready to get beyond the "candidates are hard to find" stage of recruiting you need to get a strategy and see it through.  All strategies do not work as well as you hope but as you continue to measure their effectiveness and modify the techniques used to locate, motivate, and evaluate these candidates it will provide you with hireable candidates that meet your needs.

I recommend to my clients working with a firm they can trust and developing a recruiting strategy together and then making it work.  This will have the added benefit of creating a communication channel between your internal recruiters and external, third party recruiters, that is based on more that a need for more resumes and higher salaries.

It was snowing and sleeting out and we both made it on time.  I was early because I wanted to meet with the president, briefly, and get a couple words in his ear while showing him that I was the kind of client manager that will get up at 5:30 in the morning to say hi and make sure the meeting I scheduled went off with out any trouble.

I made it. 
The president of the company made it. 
The candidate was twenty minutes late.

Candidates in China are scarce and in demand but it is no excuse for being late for an interview.  When I worked in the US I was often told by my boss there, "if you don't have candidate control don't even send them into the interview."  He was right and I made a mistake yesterday when I prepped the candidate.  I failed to take the time to re-visit the concept that until he receives a job offer he has no opportunity with this client.  It might have made a difference if I had explained, again, that he was going to meet the president of the company and that we were all aranging our schedules around him for this meeting so punctuality was a must. 

When candidates get popular I often see them go through a prima donna phase where they act as if every call from a headhunter raises their market value and every meeting will result in an offer.  Many times their actions begin to betray an arrogance that ends up costing them the jobs they want.  I have seen candidates ask for bigger offices before they receive an offer, show up late for interviews, make outrageous salary demands at initial stages, and the list (unfortunately) goes on...

Speed Dating our Clients in China

Relationships in China are as essential to business as they are in any other market and there is much already written on the subject of building relationships and the Chinese style of doing business.  While I see much written on the subject of how to approach potential business partners in China I have found little on the subject of evaluating these partners once the initial meetings have begun.  Most of what I see has to do more with not offending potential business partners through cultural gaffs than it does with how to know when one of these potential partners is wasting your time.

While I believe strong relationships are as important in China as they are anywhere else I have worked in the world I see more people here trying harder to make the wrong connections than anywhere else on Earth.  In China it seems we often ignore the objective information we are receiving as we try to enrich and enhance the subjective.  My in-house solution is speed-dating.

Speed Dating

I like the idea of speed dating, I never tried it but I hear it goes like this.  Participants spend a fixed amount of time with potential partners over the course of an evening in order to narrow down the field of prospects and concentrate their efforts with the people they felt offered them the best chance of success.  Brilliant.  The thought being that we can gain a great deal of information about a potential partner in a short period of time and use this information to focus on the most promising scenarios.

Speed Dating our Clients

In my office we use a similar system when we take on a new client.  In a contingency situation a new client is one who has met with us, given us the appropriate amount of information to decide whether we can work together and signed our fee agreement.  What comes next is our version of client speed dating.

We begin looking at the reaction speed of the new client, measuring their feedback - is it good, useful, market-correct? We  question them on their prerequisites in order to see if they really know what they are looking for or if they are just writing up an imaginary candidate they would like to see.

What is the point? (Everyone does this.)

The point is that we do this as quickly as we can to see if this is a prospective business partner and we do it as objectively as we can.  We use their actions to realize their intentions, not their words.  This is a real time saver and I am happy to share the technique with you here.  We actually use a simple spreadsheet to rank new client performance.

What I have found is that this is particularly useful with new consultants, it is a nice, clear way to measure client performance.  We have yet to look back with regret on a situation where we cut off a non-performing client.

I really dig what the guys over at ChinaSolved.com have to say - I just caught this post on compensation options that really nails the concept of variable pay (as in more pay for performers) as far as I am concerned.

It’s not supposed to be fair.
You know this – now they have to. You will be treating some members of your staff differently. They will get better compensation, better opportunities and more responsibility. Some of your young managers may find this stressful. Others will become power-crazed monsters. You will need to manage both...(http://www.chinasolved.com/blog/?p=275)

Anyone in sales understands that top performers make more. 

What I would like to see is more attention being paid to variable pay options rather than salary surveys in today’s fast-moving talent market.  Aside from the fact that salary surveys are obsolete the moment they are created we seem to be missing an incredibly important point in this talent driven market. 

Point:  There are not enough top candidates to go around.

The rest is all supply and demand economics in action.  It is getting pretty simple in today's market.  The companies that are willing to offer something special to the hard-to-find-even harder to recruit-top-talent are the companies that are able to get them and keep them. 

If you are able to quantify the contribution a top performer will make you should be able to find a way to get him or her on board and keep him or her happy.  If this upsets the "internal equity " of your department you may need to revisit the goals your CEO put in front of you.  I am willing to bet that "equity" in terms of equality was not on the list. 

There are a number of options out there to address this issue and I think it is about time that more companies in China took the time to look into them.  I have seen several companies miss out on talented individuals because their company’s compensation policies did not allow them the option of paying top talent the rate they are getting elsewhere.

Let me know if you have any good suggestions to combat this and I will happily post them here and on my personal blog, www.recruitinginchina.com.cn, in order to spread the word.

In the mean time, get back to work.  No one is paying you to be average.

Brian