Archives 2012

Jiangsu town breaks the mold in recruiting

Li Yufang didn’t follow the typical path to a government job — in fact, she didn’t even know it was an option until she received a call from a headhunter.

“I was very surprised,” said the 35-year-old, whose resume listed work at a wholesale market, a property agency and an investment firm, all in Guangdong province.

“They told me I’d been selected for an interview for a senior position at a city government, which normally don’t recruit through agencies.”

Li got the job, and in October, when more than 1 million young people were preparing to take the annual civil service exam, she was settling in as deputy director of the service industry development bureau in Shengze, a town under the jurisdiction of Suzhou, Jiangsu province.

Promoting staff members to fill senior positions remains the norm among most Chinese government agencies.

The Suzhou government said it broke the mold five years ago when it began using Suzhou Industrial Park Human Resources Development Corp to identify and lure quality candidates from the private sector.

Since then, the State-owned headhunter, based in Suzhou Industrial Park, has found about 100 candidates for various government departments and filled 20 positions.

Li was one of eight recruits from the private sector to start working for the city in October.

“We cater to a diverse range of industries across the country, working to detailed requirements and limited time,” said Kang Yue, general manager of Suzhou Industrial Park Human Resources Development. “Different departments in Suzhou have specific requirements and preferences for the positions, detailing the age, gender, work experience, and the length of leadership in the related industry.”

Most positions that authorities list are in auditing, finance, urban planning, and science and technology, which all require professional knowledge and practical experience, he said.

“This new method brought me from Guangzhou to Suzhou to apply my skills to government tasks,” said Li, who, like others recruited this way, must wait three years before they can be offered a lifetime contract.

Kang said that so far, all of his recruits have been kept on.

“We contacted the headhunting company to help with the recruitment of certain senior officials because we were unable to find people who would qualify for the positions in 2008, and because we noticed we didn’t have the many resources that headhunters do,” said the director of public information for the Suzhou government, who gave his name as Weng.

He added that the city would like to try the new method again soon because it was unexpectedly efficient and found excellent candidates within a short time.

According to the Suzhou information department, the city had problems finding enough applicants when it advertised open positions via traditional media.

“We don’t rely completely on the headhunter — it merely helps us early in the process to locate candidates from a wider range,” Weng said.

According to expert opinion, Suzhou is on the right track.

“The Suzhou government has taken an innovative step by involving the private sector in its recruiting,” said Ren Yuan, a professor at Fudan University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy.

More city governments should be encouraged to adopt similar modern methods to hire more experienced people in specific professional industries from society, he said.

Chinese women protest ‘men only’ recruitment

SHANGHAI–A group of women, including college students, in eight cities across the country, accused companies of gender discrimination in their hiring practices, flooding government organizations with letters of protest on Dec. 26.

The letters called for equal treatment of men and women in company hiring practices.

The joint action followed a protest by university students in November against intrusive gynecological tests as part of the application process for China’s civil service.

The latest letter-writing campaign started in April after Zheng Churan, then a university student in Guangzhou, sent letters to 500 companies requesting equal treatment for male and female applicants but received only one response.

Zheng graduated from university in June, but she did not stop her campaign.

Enraged at the fact that some companies turn women applicants away at the door, she went on Weibo, China’s microblog website similar to Twitter, and called for action to be taken.

“It is unfair to be deprived of an opportunity to apply, simply because you are a woman,” she said.

About 20 students from across the country sent about 550 letters addressed to government organizations in charge of social security and labor inspection.

The letters demanded the government penalize some 270 companies, which said in online recruitment sites, “only men are eligible to apply.”

Chinese laws prohibit companies from rejecting job applicants on the basis of gender.

People hope for higher pay next year

‘Will I get a pay rise?” This question is foremost on almost every wage earner’s mind as the year nears its end.

The question, however, got a positive response from the two-day Central Economic Work Conference, which concluded on Dec 16, as the new Chinese leadership made economic restructuring by boosting domestic consumption and improving people’s livelihood two of its six key tasks for next year. Increasing people’s income, no doubt, will play an important role in achieving the two goals.

Accomplishing the goals will not be an easy task, though.

The income distribution reform plan, scheduled for later this month, has been deferred again until at least next March. The repeated delays in the implementation of the plan show how difficult and complex economic reform in China is. The Chinese leadership, however, should be more determined now than ever to implement the reform because the wealth gap has widened alarmingly.

The yawning income gap has further pushed up China’s Gini coefficient – a widely recognized measure of wealth inequality, with anything above 0.4 being worrying. In a report published at the end of 2011, the National Bureau of Statistics said China’s Gini coefficient in 2010 was slightly higher than that in 2000, which it put at 0.412. A recent Southwestern University of Finance and Economics survey on China’s household financial conditions, however, put the country’s household Gini coefficient at 0.61 in 2010, compared with the world’s average of 0.44.

Though one or two surveys cannot reflect China’s true picture, the trend of widening income gap should be a warning to Chinese decision-makers.

Of course, the wealth gap cannot be narrowed by simply “robbing the rich to help the poor”, for it will not only create obstacles for the reform, but also lead to outsourcing of capital and even curbing economic growth. Nor can it be narrowed by forcing enterprises to raise the salaries of all their employees.

Maintaining growth is also a key task of the leadership next year. That means too heavy a burden should not be placed on enterprises. The impractical move of forcing enterprises to raise all their employees’ salaries will increase their human resources costs and deal a deadly blow to the smaller ones. Thus the government has to navigate through the difficult waters of income distribution reform to achieve the different and sometimes, more or less, paradoxical goals.

A recent report by Towers Watson, a global advisory services company, shows that Chinese enterprises remain cautious about pay rise in 2013, and the average increase is expected to be 9.3 percent, slightly lower than 9.6 percent in 2012. Such an increase is not disheartening. But more importance should be paid to narrowing the income gap between companies’ senior managers and ordinary workers.

Today, the income of China’s highest 10 percent earners is 23 times that of the lowest 10 percent, compared with 7.3 times in 1988. According to a report published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in October, the incomes of management personnel have increased much faster than that of ordinary workers over the past five years, with the yearly salary of senior management personnel of listed companies rising from 291,000 yuan ($46,648.6) in 2005 to 668,000 yuan in 2010, an average increase of 18.1 percent.

China’s wealth gap widening

Fresh data shows how China’s income gap is worsening, an issue new leader Xi Jinping has resolved to tackle.

While decades of strong economic growth have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese off the poverty line, the country’s wealth gap has widened to the point where it is among the world’s most unequal nations.

China’s Gini coefficient, which is commonly used to gauge inequality in income or wealth, stood at 61 in 2010, according to a study by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance.

The Gini coefficient measures the wealth gap on a scale of 0 to 100. A reading above 40 usually marks strong inequality in wealth and income.

The coefficient of all countries monitored by the World Bank averaged 44 for 2010. Ireland’s Gini coefficient in 2010 was 33.2, according to Eurostat, a sharply worse reading than in 2009, when it was 28.8.

The Gini data is extremely sensitive in China, and the government has not released an official figure since 2000, when it stood at 41.2.

‘ Rare ’

Gan Li, chief researcher and a professor at the research centre, which is part of the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, said the reading was “rare in the world” and the gap was wide in both urban and rural areas.

But he said the reading was not “dreadful” because a wide gap between rich and poor was common in a fast-developing country.

One option would be to raise the minimum wage, but that would also hurt employment, he said. “We hope the government could spend more on improving people’s social welfare,” said Mr Gan.

Research earlier this year from the think tank showed that 10 per cent of Chinese households held up to 57 per cent of all disposable income.

The domestic east-west divide was stark, too. The combined income of all households in eastern provinces was about 2.7 times that of the west and central regions.

Central Economic Working Conference aims at guaranteeing people’s livelihood

The Central Economic Working Conference (CEWC) proposes the government enhance people’s livelihood and improve the standard of living. The goal is to be addressed under the guidelines of “keeping the bottom line, highlighting the key points, improving the mechanism and positively guiding the public opinion”.

The CEWC highlighted guaranteeing the basic life of low-income people. The government pledges to finance students born in poor families. Attention will be paid to stabilizing and expanding employment. The government will also strive to create more job opportunities for college students.

The government plans to shore up the development of small businesses and push large enterprises to recommit to corporate social responsibilities. The social insurance systems in both rural and urban areas will be enhanced. China will continue to intensify the construction and management of affordable housing and accelerate the transformation of shantytowns.

The Chinese government vows to lead people to setting in mind that to improve the living standard or become well-off is through hard work.

“To guarantee people’s livelihood requires the government to not only make every effort, but also have a clear evaluation of its own capability. To ‘keep the bottom line and highlight key points’ is very important,” commented Zhang Li Qun, researcher of macro-economic department in Development Research Center of the State Council.

Zhang said that one of the key points of the government’s work is to provide basic public services, and the bottom line is to guarantee the basic livelihood of people. The low-income group is problematic in society, and they especially need the help from the government. Furthermore, with the slowdown of economic growth and the promotion of economic restructuring, some people’s employment and income is expected to be affected. Therefore, the corresponding guarantees should be prepared earlier.

Zhang came up with one conclusion: that to improve people’s livelihood, on one hand the government should expand economic input, and on the other hand people should create wealth through hard work. Neither of the two should be neglected.

China Merchants Securities first layoff 5 pct staff

Insiders in China Merchants Securities (CMS) confirmed that the securities firm is carrying out a 5 percent elimination to the last, according to the Financial Weekly. Some investment bank employees have been transferred to other departments. And some investment bank staff who didn’t accept job transfers chose simply to leave. The timing of transfers and layoffs relates to many sponsor representatives and quasi-sponsor representatives.

This is the first time CMS has had to lay off personnel. A person working in the investment bank department of the securities firm said that mainly new staff have been fired, so there’s not so much obstruction towards the redundancy.

Different from other securities firms, the redundancy of CMS only focuses on the investment banking department. Currently, there are 300 people working in that department in CMS. With a 5 percent layoff ratio, it is estimated that around 15 people will be leaving.

Disclosed by the official website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), CMS has 82 sponsor representatives. But it has only seven IPOs, with three additional programs were completed this. If each sponsor representative signs one contract, which represents the lowest efficiency of the human resource use, a maximum of merely 20 sponsor representatives have been engaged in projects. The rest of the 62 sponsor representatives had no output, which may make it difficult to recoup their 100 million yuan annual salaries.

Higher pay and stronger yuan slow hiring

The manufacturing industry’s demand for new employees shrunk by more than 20 percent year-on-year in the first three quarters of this year, according to a recent survey released by the Seebon Human Resources Research Institute.

Among industries, shipping showed the greatest hiring demand, as the need for more employees in transportation, warehousing and postal services increased steadily in the first nine months of 2012, the report said.

Contributing to that result has been the success of e-commerce and the ever-tenser competition among online shopping malls. Industrial restructuring has also led to the disparities in hiring demand, said analysts at the Seebon Human Resources Research Institute.

The survey also said the reduction in job opportunities has resulted in part from the international market’s declining interest in products manufactured in China, and the greater number of robots now performing jobs formerly done by people.

It predicted that rising labor costs, the incessant appreciation of the yuan and shrinking overseas demand will force small and medium-sized manufacturers, which once were the source of many job opportunities, to exit the market.

The survey also found that the number of people hired in the first three quarters of the year was up by 5 percent year-on-year. The demand for employees was the strongest in Beijing, Changsha, Kunming, Shenyang and Tianjin during that period.

Most workers saw their incomes rise by 15.1 percent year-on-year in the first three quarters of this year, the report said.

“The average monthly salary for a worker at our factory has increased by at least 15 percent to more than 3,000 yuan ($481) from the beginning of the year,” said Gu Zhongwei, general manager of the Wuxi-based Handa Enterprise Fabric Department.

“In the entire textile industry, nobody is talking about profits now. We are only thinking of making it through our current difficulties.

“There is literally no order. Our former partners are now turning to manufacturers in Vietnam and Cambodia, where they offer salaries of only $60 a month.”

Shen Xiangjun, manager of Ningbo Jinfan Toy Co Ltd, agreed that labor costs are much higher in China than in other countries.

“I have investigated the Indian market recently,” he said. “It turns out that labor costs there are 70 percent cheaper than in China.”

He said the average monthly salary at his company exceeds 3,000 yuan.

“Soaring labor cost and rapidly increasing salaries are partly the results of government policies,” said Pu Yonghao, Hong Kong-based regional chief investment officer for Asia Pacific at UBS Wealth Management.

“On the other hand, the profit margins of companies have been greatly impaired, especially in labor-intensive industries such as manufacturing. It is very likely that Chinese companies of this kind will lose their edge.”

Overseas talents increasingly take up key posts in China state-owned firms

Chinese state-owned companies directly under the central government have hired more than 1,600 overseas employees, said Huang Shuhe, deputy director of the State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, according to China Daily.

“International experts have helped these enterprises produce many of the world’s leading technologies and products with their own intellectual property rights, and that has laid a foundation that will carry the enterprises forward,” Huang was quoted by the paper as saying on Monday.

The Recruitment Program of Global Experts, started from 2008, has hired 136 high-level experts, the paper said.

Another recruitment program, started last year, aims to introduce up to 1,000 foreign professionals over 10 years to help spur innovation, promote scientific research and corporate management.

Zhang Jianguo, director of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. Told the paper the grogram has hired 94 people.

Professionals recruited by both programs will be entitled to subsidies, research allowances, favorable salaries, residency permits, medical care and insurance policies, the paper said.

Recruitment kicks off for Disney Shanghai theme park

Walt Disney Co started a recruitment campaign in China on Tuesday for its new theme park in Shanghai.

A total of 39 positions are being offered on the company’s website to support the resort project in Shanghai’s Pudong district.

Positions include assistant contract manager, IT infrastructure manager, and employees responsible for administrative management matters, purchasing, and engineering projects.

The resort, which is expected to open in 2015, will have a theme park, two hotels, various dining and entertainment venues, recreational facilities, a lake and transportation hubs.

The total investment is expected to reach 24.5 billion yuan ($3.84 billion) for the theme park and 4.5 billion yuan for the hotels and other facilities.

Work is slow for online recruiters

ChinaHR was up for sale by its largest shareholder Monster Worldwide Inc. (NYSE: MWW) in early November. But so far no company is willing to take over ChinaHR.

According to the company’s third quarter financial report, Monster’s operating revenue in the third quarter has significantly decreased by 10.5 percent and the company suffered a net loss of $194.2 million, of which ChinaHR contributes $233 million – partially offset by Monster’s other more lucrative holdings.

In fact, ChinaHR is not the only online recruitment company trapped in a slump in China. Data from iResearch reveals that three Chinese online recruitment giants – 51job.com, zhaopin.com and ChinaHR.com, all suffered from decreasing visitors for the first time since 2011.

The mostly homogenous services provided by online recruitment companies are losing power to attract clients with the growth of social networking websites.

According to the Global Employees Index published by Kelly Services, 80 percent of Chinese employees visit social networking websites everyday, 21 percent of which are using these networks to look for jobs.

At present, the platform gathering the most global professional talent is the business networking website LinkedIn, founded at the end of 2002 and publicly listed in 2011. Now it hosts 187 million registered users and 109 million unique visitors per month.

The LinkedIn pattern was copied by large numbers of Chinese professional networking websites after its successful IPO, including wealink.com, tianji.com, dajie.com and wolonge.com.

“Among so many professional networking websites, it’s difficult to judge who will win the appreciation of most users at the moment,” said one analyst.

It was reported that the registered users on professional networking websites have exceeded 70 million and is expected to reach 100 million in three months.

The number of Chinese professionals is huge and is rapidly growing with the development of economy. However, the vertical social service platforms targeting professionals are still in the initial stages, said Han Hui, CEO wolonge.com.

Traditional online recruitment cannot solve the information gap between recruiting companies and job seekers, while professional networking websites can provide a platform for them to know each other more and to respect each other