Archives October 2007

12 Questions to Measure Employee Engagement

1.Do you know what is expected of you at work?
2.Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
3.At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
4.In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5.Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
6.Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
7.At work, do your opinions seem to count?
8.Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
9.Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
10.Do you have a best friend at work?
11.In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
12.In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

B.D Manager(Logs & Lumber) – A famous international supply company

A famous international supply company
A Leading global supply chain manager of agricultural products and food ingredients.
Operate an integrated supply chain for 14 products sourcing from 12,000 collection points in over 35 origin countries and delivering them to over 3,000 customers in 50 destination markets. We are today a global leader in many of these businesses including Cocoa, Coffee, Cashew, Sheanuts, Sesame, Rice and Teak Wood.

Responsible:
1. Responsible for Domestic sales of logs & lumber.
2. Provide market information on supply, demand and price movements.
3. Liaise with foreign buyers, suppliers, overseas offices on shipments, documentation, payments etc.
4. Recruit and train sub-ordinates in quality, grading, measurement and sales.

Requirements:
1. University graduate around 30-35 years old.
2. Proficiency in English & Mandarin.
3. Minimum 5-10 years relevant experience in wood industry.
4. Excellent interpersonal skills & ability to meet deadlines under minimal supervision required.
5. Ability to lead a Team, mature, reliable & able to work under pressure.
6. Willing to travel extensively for business set up.
7. Conversant in common office software.

* Please send us your complete resume (both in Chinese and in English) to:
‘topjob_mkt221sh#dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject MUST you plus the position name £¨in either En or Ch £©

China Online Hiring Adoption

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.

An European Company Seeking a Managing Director, Urgently

Company Introduction:
The company is one of Europe leading worldwide meter reading and billing service providers.

Location: Beijing
Reporting Line:
Technology: All employees of the company reporting to the director
Administration: All employees of the company reporting to the director

Direct technology reporting to: Chairman of the Board of Directors
Indirect technology reporting to: Chairman of the Board of Directors
Administration reporting to: Chairman of the Board of Directors
Backup:
Technology: Assignment by Managing Director
Administration: Assignment by the Managing Director

Main responsibilities:
Be responsible for the transfer and adaptation of company¡¯s system-business in China, with considering the characteristics of the market. Be responsible for the success and sales outcome of the company. The director is a deputy of the company¡¯s interests, whenever inside or outside of it.
Making The company¡¯s strategy of future product, business scope and establishing a client-oriented integration solution in the field of services and business, after agreed with the shareholders.
1. Management and control the sales market of China.
2. Sales support for key clients
3. Public relation work, executing the reception work
4. Development of strategic cooperation
5. Making, monitoring and control the annual budget
6. Ensuring the agreed outcomes
7. Making the personnel plan and deciding the salary after consultation with the Executive Director
8. Recruitment and training
9. Making measures to ensure security
Specialty:
1. Good knowledge of sales/marketing
2. Good knowledge of China¡¯s sector (mainly heating) and real estate sector
3. Acquaintance with law
4. Good knowledge of business administration
Special skill:
1. Good negotiation skill
2. Good presentation skill
3. Good moderation skill
4. The skill to solve emergencies and conflicts
5. IT knowledge
6. Master English and Chinese, German is an advantage
Personality:
1. Enterprising
2. Excellent management skill
3. Outstanding intercultural cooperation skill
4. Outstanding expression in public
5. Good communication skill
Background:
1. Good relationship with relevant ministries or authorities in the field of construction and/or energy supply, as well as universities.
2. Several years of leading experience (multinational company in Asia, North of China) is an advantage.
3. Major in business administration or supply technology (relevant).

* Please send us your complete resume (both in Chinese and in English) to:
‘topjob_eo126bj#dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)

Learning to mind your own business

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 Kuo Director of China

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.

Executive hiring in Asia to accelerate in Q4 -Hudson

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.

Workers go for quick turnover

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.

Foreign training key to Chinese success

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.

Standard Recruiting Practices in the People’s Republic of China

Based on information gathered from several sources, it appears that clinical trial subjects in China are recruited in a limited number of ways, starting with heavy reliance on the investigator to tell appropriate patients about the study, followed by the use of posters and fliers in waiting rooms at accredited clinical trial sites.

Hospitals in the major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Ghangzhou, Chongqing, and Nanjing, tend to be very large by Western standards, many with more than 1,000 beds, reflecting the centralized nature of healthcare delivery in China. As a result, doctors in those institutions are extremely busy, seeing as many as 50 patients most mornings.

Yet, while working at that harried pace, some doctors, especially those seeking to increase their clinical trial workload, remember to discuss clinical trials with patients. Yue Wei, vice president and medical director of Beijing MedSept Consulting Co., a CRO, says, “Doctors generally discuss the opportunity to participate with patients. That is the common way.”

Stefan Astrom, Ph.D., CEO of Astrom Research International, adds, “[Doctors] recruit patients from their regular patient pool. There is an abundance of patients and it’s very attractive for them to participate in trials as they may receive new treatment, extra patient care and free medication.” In addition, patients generally do not see the same physician each time they visit a clinic, so the promise of seeing the same physician over the course of a clinical trial may spur interest…

Posters in the waiting rooms may make patients aware of ongoing trials but, according to Shanghai Pharma Engine, a Chinese CRO, patients rarely initiate discussions about them and generally look to the doctor to start this type of conversation.

Notification by physicians and posters may be the key modalities used to recruit subjects, but evidence suggests that other tools are used, as well, but to a lesser degree. A recent article referred to the use of newspapers to advertise about clinical trials.

Representatives of Union Clinical Research Services, Ltd., a Beijing-based company handling clinical trial management at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, explained to a 2005 U.S. delegation (see next section) that various types of electronic media, namely television and radio, are used. The general sense, however, is that electronic media is rarely used.

Sandy Matzek-Cole, one of the delegates, explains, “It’s not clear how frequently these modalities are used, and their use seems to be random rather than as part of an organized recruitment campaign.” Dr. Wei of Beijing MedSept adds, “A few use websites, but ads hardly ever appeared in the media. It’s mostly print-style posters.”

The limited advertising in China seems to be done in accordance with GCP Guidelines, whereby written approval for subject recruitment material is required by an independent ethics committee (IEC). Lisa Sun, clinical process manager for AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical Co. in Shanghai, says IEC approval for patient recruitment advertisements is routine in China. Furthermore, she explains that the names of the sponsor and the product cannot appear in the ads, “only the indication and/or target group as well as the contact name of the hospital or institute.”

Is compensation to study volunteers allowed in China?

GCP Guidelines allow for compensation of study volunteers, provided this information appears in the informed consent document, which has the written approval of the appropriate institutional review board (IRB) or ethics committee (ICH-GCP Sec. 4.8 and Guideline 7 of CIOMS). So, technically speaking, compensation is permitted in China.

In practice, however, there appears to be conflicting opinion on whether compensation is permitted. Some believe that compensation is provided to subjects participating in Phase I studies, but not in subsequent phases. Dr. Astrom says, “Healthy volunteers in Phase I studies are compensated according to international practices. Patients in Phase II, III and IV studies are never compensated, except occasionally for travel costs.”

Similarly, representatives of the Peking Union Medical College mentioned to the People-to-People delegation that generally, patients are not compensated for participation.

By contrast, James Fan, M.D., of Protech Pharmaservices Corp., a CRO, says, “According to No. 43 items of GCP issued by SFDA on 2003-09-01, the sponsor must pay compensation and insurance to patients or volunteers.”

In addition, guidance for medical device studies found in “Provisions for Clinical Trials of Medical Devices,” Chapter 2, specifically states that compensation for study volunteers is permitted, encouraged even, and that information about compensation is to be presented during the informed consent process.

Excerpted from Anderson’s book International Patient Recruitment Regulatory Guidelines, Customs and Practices.