More resumes, please.

Our number one priority.

I have been on business development meetings all week with one of my consultants here in Shanghai. We have seen quite a few clients and potential clients from the Fortune 500 and I have come to the conclusion that in race to hire the best there are a pretty good number of turtles and too few hares. I wrote a book review for the American Chamber of Commerce’s monthly publication, Insight, of Ed Cohen’s new book Leadership Without Borders (Wiley and Sons.) I mention this because it is the latest article/book I have read that tells me that we are in a global struggle for talent and that “recruiting, retaining, and managing personnel is more important than it was historically.” We are also told that The Economist reported that “62% of all senior human resource managers worry about company-wide talent shortages,” and that “Three-quarters of them made attracting and retaining talent their number one priority.” I am skeptical that it is really their number one priority. The way I see things shaping up in China we are faced with several challenges in finding and getting top talent hired into the companies that need them. The majority of companies I speak with are not having as much trouble finding the talent that they need as they are having trouble affording it. (I have taught the phrase “internal equity” to four people this week.) We spoke to several firms this week who told us they are getting candidates that match their JD’s but they can’t afford them (and can we do any better?) This is a growing problem that many large firms are having a hard time adjusting to. I see a lot of openings that will go unfilled as the candidates who are qualified are already earning more than the positions are paying. The answer to this is not more recruiting though; it is engaging the hiring managers in some frank discussions about what the “right” candidate really looks like. I have run into some similar situations in the past and have found that when the hiring managers are really brought in on the case they will be willing to be flexible in certain areas and often end up with some great, affordable, talent. The key is having recruiters (internal) who know the market and the positions for which they are recruiting. This will allow the recruiters (internal) to engage outside search professionals as partners rather than vendors. Companies will be rewarded by candidates who are able to do the job and fit the budget. Too often in China I come across internal recruiters who are only looking for “more resumes.” These recruiters are usually most comfortable with local agencies that act as resume brokers and add little value to the process. When hiring becomes a priority to these companies they will have professionals with experience in the industry take a hard look at their salaries, job descriptions, and recruiting methods. When hiring is a top priority we will see more senior managers take an interest in recruiting rather than handing this task down the line to the least senior of all HR staff. We will also see improvements when recruiting and retention is a KPI of managers, but don’t get me started…..

Hiring Managers: Read This

I don't like to poach too many articles for my blog but the one below is a must-read for any hiring managers who want to know how to succeed in China. It touches on two ponts that must be made very clear to hiring managers in China: 1. Hire great candidates when you have the chance. James Rice does and he has been in this market for 16 years. I do not know James but I am going to back his decision making ability in this market. If you do not have the head count, get it. If you need a bigger budget, get it. China is extremely competitive, if you are not you should not be surprised at what you get. 2. Your employees want training, your employees are going to leave in two years. Everything in China is a negotiation - trade training for retention, use pay-back periods, defer training opportunities to meet retention and succession plans (you do have these and they are written and you have shared them with your managers, right?) Shift your retention focus to increase the typical retention by one year. You will save money, lower turnover, and your company will make more money. I talk to too many HR managers who bemoan their turnover but refuse to focus on the fact that they move every two years. Keep it real. Go fpr realistic goals and if all of your people are claimng that they are leaving because of training opportunities, give them some options.

Hiring Top Talent in China Takes a Boss Who Likes to Coach By Carol Hymowitz From The Wall Street Journal Online Any company that wants to succeed in China -- and the list grows longer every day -- needs to understand what matters even more than an understanding of distribution networks and good relationships with government officials: executives on the ground who truly enjoy coaching their employees.

Whether they work in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, executives at multinationals who stay behind closed doors and rarely offer performance feedback or advice are bound to fail. That's because the local hires they need to run their offices and plants will be seeking out bosses who will help them advance their careers. With China's economy growing so rapidly, multinationals and private and state-run Chinese companies are competing fiercely for talent. Young, educated Chinese from top schools with a few years of work experience often have their pick of entry and midlevel jobs in sales, marketing, finance, government relations and manufacturing. They can also command much higher salaries now than they could a few years ago, though they're still paid far less than expats. Money, though, isn't necessarily their top priority when weighing offers. In a recent study of several dozen Chinese managers it was found that "money is a less important reason to change jobs than the potential to grow and have a close working relationship with an immediate boss." James Rice, a Tyson Foods vice president and the company's general manager in China, understands this sentiment and has made mentoring part of his job. A 16-year veteran in China, he previously worked for Dannon and Kimberly Clark. One of his current sales managers first worked for him as a secretary at Dannon and, with Mr. Rice's coaching, advanced to management. He quit Dannon when Mr. Rice moved to Tyson last May. "I didn't want to poach [from Dannon] but he was going to take another job anyway, so I asked him to work for me again," says Mr. Rice. A few weeks ago, he recruited a young manager with an MBA degree from the University of North Carolina by promising training and promotion. The manager was weighing another offer from a multinational, and Mr. Rice didn't have a specific opening for him. But he was determined not to lose the chance to hire him. "He's very smart and speaks perfect English, and we're growing by more than 20% a year so it makes sense to hire ahead," says Mr. Rice, who plans to expand Tyson's China-based operations through acquisitions. "I pitched him very heavily on what I'd do to work with him and help him grow his career. I told him that for the next 12 months, he'll be my assistant, going with me wherever I go -- and then he'll get a line position," Mr. Rice says. Stella Hou, who manages the compensation measurement practice for Hewitt Associates in China, is often a personal counselor as well as a career coach to her 30 employees. In the U.S. and Europe, "managers don't feel they should trespass into employees' personal lives, but Chinese employees often expect their bosses to do that," she says. She spent hours listening to an employee vent anger and grief when her marriage fell apart. Young recruits, many of them products of China's one-child policy, also often require coaching on how to gain independence from their parents. Mr. Rice has had to tell some prospective employees that their parents aren't welcome to sit in on job interviews. And when an intern in Ms. Hou's office talked constantly about how much his mother takes care of him, co-workers began counting the number of times he invoked his mother's name and then subtly suggested he change that habit. "He'd say, 'my Mommy bought me this shirt,' or 'my mommy made me this meal,' " says Ms. Hou. "One day he brought her up 25 times." She prefers hiring employees whose parents live in provinces far from Shanghai or who went to boarding school at young ages. "They've been less pampered" than only children who have had their parents' and grandparents' undivided attention, she says. For their part, Chinese employees, especially those in their 20s and 30s, don't want to stay in any one job for more than a few years. They are looking for training and frequent promotions, and they're willing to job hop to advance. Among the companies that has benefited is Beijing-based Sohu.com, one of China's main Internet portals. Founded eight years ago, Sohu.com, which now has 1,400 employees, has wooed hundreds of upwardly mobile young Chinese from multinationals. Andy Zhao, a group leader in human resources at the company, formerly worked at McDonald's, where he advanced from trainee to store manager over a six-year period. But then he quit, because his boss, he says, "was too vague" about his chances for future promotions. He says he likes Sohu.com's innovative culture and his "caring bosses," who encourage him to "make fast changes every day." But he adds that how long he stays there will depend on "whether I can keep growing and changing."

Internal Equity

Meeting Expectations In China in the "old" days you could use a once a year salary survey to determine the market value of your candidates. Today salaries are changing on an an almost daily basis. Most of the candidates in Chna are very open with one another and they usually have a good idea of their market value. There is no room in todays negotiations for low-ball offers to see if the candidate will take less. These invariably fail as the candidate can get what they are looking for elsewhere. We constantly probe new candidates and ask about the range of their other offers and track those that accept our offers to find out what works and what doesn't. Exceding Expectations Top Candidates are facing more and more offers and counter-offers from their current firms. In my opinion counter offers are (almost) always a terrible idea. In order to compete on a level above just raising the salary and hoping for the best I reccomend getting your Hiring Managers involved. Let your own managers know why the offer is better thatn the competition's and how to discuss it with the candidate when they meet. Increase sign-on bonus and stock option limits. Decrease the focus on internal equity by tying any pay over the internal maximum to performance. Get creative, the competition is! Use your recruiters to close the candidates before you make an offer. If your recruiters do not give you the candidate's "magic number" and have authority to accept on their behalf you need to get better recruiters. More than Money Applicants expect growth, communication, a great manager and a work/life balance in addition to the money. Take the initiative to alter job scope to entice top performers, offer specific training to them as a signing bonus, find out what they need in their tool kit and offer them the chance to get it. If you are unable to do this you need to talk to the decision makers at your company and impress upon them the value of the candidates you are missing out on. Shift Your focus must go beyond the buzz words: corporate branding, training, traction, buy-in, you know them as well as I do. Shift the perception of this market in the minds and hearts of your managers to make a difference. Make hiring a performance indicator. Spend some time looking (objectively) at your hiring process and exteral relationships.

Always be closing your candidates.

Interview strategies for attracting and landing top performers

“Include a sales segment. Before you begin the interview, allocate enough time to "sell" the candidate on the job. When you're planning your interviews, divide them into time frames or segments for each assessment area and be sure and allocate at least one quarter of the time (in some cases, at least half for "hard-to-sell" candidates) toward convincing the candidate that, if offered the job, they would accept it. If you happen to know their "job acceptance criteria" in advance, it's relatively easy to put together a sales pitch. Remember to ask them at the end of the interview specifically, "Do you have any concerns?" and "Do you need any additional information in order to make your decision?" “

Dr. John Sullivan, in an article for ERE.net, (an outstanding resource for recruiters and non-recruiters who need to improve their recruiting skills,) wrote the above. I find recently that more and more Hiring Managers are getting tired of being trained in how to interview candidates and it occurred to me while reading the above article that much time is being wasted in this training when it does not include the addition of a sales segment. I recently heard that a Hiring Manager resented the fact that he had to sell his company’s benefits to a passive candidate they were meeting. This is troublesome on many levels and until hiring and retaining are added as a KPIs for managers in China this is not going to change. I don’t try to fix everything at once (not since that Ford Pinto incident in High School, at least) so I usually suggest that my clients use a three-man approach to the interview process. The order is not as important as the execution of this technique which entails using one interviewer to judge the candidate’s technical competency, another to judge the candidate’s soft skills and corporate ‘fit’, and a third to act as the company’s number one fan. Most HR recruiters are very good at the third role but are often asked to play too many of these parts and end up overwhelmed. The candidate ends up under whelmed. This model works with active candidates as well as passive candidates and is pretty quickly adopted by most organizations. It takes a lot of weight off of interviewers, as well, asking them to focus on just one aspect of the candidate and letting them use what they have learned in those interviewing classes. When dealing with passive candidates, those candidates introduced by a head hunter who, while interested in what may be a better opportunity at your company, are genuinely happy at their positions, I highly recommend a sales segment for your interviews. A passive job seeker is one who is currently employed and not actively seeking a new job. He may not be happy in his current job but he is not job hunting and has been introduced to you by your headhunter. For more ideas like these or to engage AdMark in a search please find me at brian @admarkasia.com

Sharing Market Conditions with Hiring Managers

Why taking orders in this market won't work.

I had a chance to see Senior Vice President of Development Dimensions International’s Selection Solutions Scott Erker last week (he is not pictured here.) He gave a seminar on improving relationships with key stakeholders in the selection process. It was a good presentation that applied in a big-picture way to what we face here in China. One of the questions that was raised during the presentation was "How do I get my Hiring Managers to tell me what they really need in a candidate?" I went on to discuss this further with the people at my table, mostly corporate HR Managers, and found the they often have a hard time getting to the bottom of what their managers really need in a candidate and what they add to the Job Description to either fill up the page or to add to the "order" the corporate recruiter is taking. This is the same challenge that we often face as external recruiters. We need to find out what the Hiring Manager really needs while comparing it to what we know is in the market. We do this in a number of ways. First is by double checking that everything in the JD is really necessary. Can, for instance, we substitute one common software package for another. Does the candidate really need x years of experience? A good recruiter will use a number of "what-if" questions to get the answers s/he needs; "What if the candidate has all of the technical skills but only y years of experience, What if his background is in another industry?, What if...." We use these to get an idea of the candidate that can do the job. What a good recruiter is doing with all these questions is creating a functional description from the corporate job description of what the successful candidate will have to do when she gets the job while letting the Hiring Manger know that he is not able to get exactly what he has put down on the job order/job description. Compromise is key in this market as many of the "perfect" candidates that we will find will be far above the salary expectations of our clients and they need to realize that to remain within their budget they will have to be flexible and think outside the tick boxes. Good recruiters, internal or external, should not be order takers, they should be windows into the market for the managers they work with. The best Hiring Managers are those that take the current market conditions into consideration and re-think what they need to see in the successful candidate.