Category Internet & IT Recruiting

Google Applauds Chinese Talent Pool

In America, much of Google’s success is attributed to its brilliant employees. In China, there’s no reason that the situation would be any different, but as a bonus, the company could gain a competitive edge by hiring locals.

Google’s poor understanding of Chinese culture has been pinpointed as a reason for its failures in that country; an old Baidu commercial even portrayed Google as a Westerner with embarrassingly poor Chinese-language skills. Hiring Chinese citizens might be an ideal way to overcome this image.

Furthermore, the practice could be beneficial to Google in many other areas. “[T]he nation has such a huge talent potential,” Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google China, told the AP. “I think there will undoubtedly be innovation in China.”

Innovation is exactly what Google needs – the company’s search market share is approximately one-third of Baidu’s, and has shown little improvement over the past six months. Also, Google’s a bit weak in the mobile department, and cell phones and texting are absolutely taking off in China.

Of course, nothing’s guaranteed to work – it’s not like Google hasn’t tried to reverse its fall in China before. Eric Schmidt has given the division a pretty long leash, however, so no heads are likely to roll in the near future.

Microsoft to hire 1,000 engineers in China

BEIJING (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday it would hire 1,000 engineers in the current fiscal year, joining the current 5,000 staff in China.

“We will add 1,000 engineers,” Zhang Yaqin, the company’s chairman in the mainland, told reporters on the sidelines of a conference. “There will be researchers, but most will be involved with product,” he said, without elaborating.

The comments come after Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said earlier this month that the Chinese market was important to Microsoft but Beijing needed to do more to protect intellectual property rights.

Microsoft has said more than a fifth of its software running globally was pirated.

IT workers earn more than others

PEOPLE working in the information technology industry earned more than employees in all other industries on average last year, according to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau.

They were followed by workers in the finance, electricity, gas and water, real estate and scientific research sectors, the bureau said.

The wage gap between different sectors widened last year. The average wage in the IT sector was 3.55 times of the average salary for those in the service sector, the lowest paid group of workers, while in 2000, the average wage in the highest sector was 3.24 times that of the lowest.

From 2000 to 2006, wages in the manufacturing industry grew 13.3 percent annually, and wages for the service sector grew 14.6 percent, the bureau said.

Local employees earned 29,569 yuan (US$3,937) a year on average last year, up 10.2 percent from a year earlier.

Global tech players must rethink China strategy

Many multinational hi-tech firms in China are facing stagnation or even declining market share as Chinese competitors secure the emerging mid-range market for hi-tech goods.

McKinsey research shows that 30 to 75 percent of future growth in the global hi-tech industry will be in this mid-range segment, defined as products priced between 30 percent and 50 percent less than their premium counterparts.

Chinese hi-tech firms are quickly edging out global firms in capturing the emerging mid-range market. By defining innovation differently and looking for value throughout the business system, Chinese firms get more out of every R&D dollar spent, allowing them to launch goods cheaper and quicker than their global competitors.

Worryingly for global firms, enormous inefficiencies in their own R&D processes mean Chinese companies have a huge scope for productivity, cost and innovation gains. Many multinationals are aggressively hiring Chinese R&D managers and collaborating with global technical service partners to implement streamlined R&D processes.

Even more worryingly, as soon as Chinese manufacturers secure the global market for mid-range goods, they will gain the cost and scale advantages needed to move up the value chain into premium products. From there, it””s just a matter of time before they capture high-end share from foreign firms in China and, eventually, in more developed markets.

For global manufacturers, achieving competitiveness in the mid-range segment will not be easy. Years of cumulative R&D experience have been directed at hi-tech innovation and superior quality, and as a result, products are often over-engineered for Chinese customers.

One European supplier of industrial components, for example, rigorously tests its highly engineered products to ensure a 5- to 10-year lifespan, but sells to Chinese manufacturers whose products only last three years.

Global tech players need to completely rethink their R&D approach and rediscover the lost art of low-cost R&D. They must ask what kind of products customers are demanding, and then redesign their R&D processes to meet these lower specifications and cost points.

Perhaps the only truly effective way they can do this is to bring their R&D capabilities to China, much as they have already done with manufacturing.

In doing so, global companies need to avoid the temptation to bring in too many expatriate engineers who implement traditional R&D processes that are unsuitable in China.

Chinese engineers already have the required technical know-how, so firms only need to bring in a few foreign experts to hone specific skills, such as the ability to translate consumer needs into technical specifications, instilling standardized R&D processes, maintaining end-to-end oversight, and designing a local production solution that best balances cost, quality and stability.

Rather than building their own localized R&D teams from scratch, firms could also acquire a local competitor and take over the company”s R&D operations and processes. Its products could then be subsumed under the global brand, or retained as a sub-brand to avoid diluting the premium brand”s image.

Some companies have already succeeded at localizing R&D to tap into the low-cost approaches of its Chinese counterparts. One global medical equipment maker, for instance, increased its market share from 18 to 45 percent by localizing its R&D processes to better meet the needs – and budgets – of potential customers in China.

Motorola and Nokia quickly identified what Chinese consumers wanted and could afford, and now develop mobile phones that span the entire price range. Together, they now capture over 50 percent of all mobile phone sales in China.

Other global manufacturers hoping to follow in their footsteps must go under a major mindset shift to make the necessary transition from “Made in China” to “Designed in China, for China”.

Those companies who do not quickly take steps to produce the mid-range products currently in demand will be left behind in the world”s most important emerging market. From there, it will be much harder to defend global market share against the rising tide of Chinese hi-tech goods.

Ingo Beyer von Morgenstern is a Shanghai-based director at McKinsey & Company. Paul Gao is a partner at McKinsey”s Shanghai office

Source:China Daily

UK’s tech firms turn to India, China to overcome skill crunch

NEW DELHI: Engineering and technology firms in the United Kingdom are turning to India, China and South Africa to fulfill their skills requirement, a latest survey has said.

In the UK, 48 per cent of the companies in the sector have recruited people from overseas in the last 12 months to cover specific skills shortages, a survey by Institution of Engineering and Technology said, indicating a major chunk of this was carried out in India, China and South Africa.

UK firms are turning to countries such as India, China and South Africa to plug the skills gap,” it said.

The survey cautioned that the skill shortage is unlikely to improve in the short or medium term. This is likely to drive the companies to countries like India where cheap labour is available.

Proportion of companies that are expected to face difficulties in recruiting adequate qualified engineers, technicians or technologists over the next four years had risen to 51.8 per cent in 2007 from 40.2 per cent in 2006, said the survey, which took into account 500 respondents.

“The engineering and technology sector is vital to the future prosperity of the UK’s economy and an increase in skill shortages puts the future growth, success and competitive advantage of many businesses into serious doubt.

“The UK desperately needs to increase the pool of engineers and technicians to meet the demand,” IET Director of Professional Operations Paul Jackson said.

The IET survey builds on information from 2006 and shows that although sector is growing, only 56 per cent of respondents believed they would be able to recruit enough people into engineering and technical roles this year.

The survey also found more than 70 per cent of companies in the UK are struggling to recruit experienced or mid career level staff, which could threaten growth and competitiveness.

It revealed that recruitment of women in the UK has remained static with just seven per cent of the engineering and technology workforce represented by the fairer sex.

The proportion of women in the sector would remain the same for the coming next four years as well, IET projected.

IET provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas and promotes the positive role of science, engineering and technology in the world.

Motorola CIO on recruiting, retaining talent in china

Motorola CIO Patricia Morrison talks about recruiting and retaining talent in the global marketplace, innovation in IT and developing a process for integrating acquisitions.

Four of the five business unit CIOs who work for you are women. How do you happen to have so many women in top IT positions at Motorola?

In a couple of cases, they were promoted, and in others, they were hired from the outside. When you have an opening, you make sure you have a diversity of candidates, in gender, experience and other ways.

Given all the concerns in the industry about attracting women to IT, would you personally choose a woman for a job if all other variables were roughly equal?

I don’t think that way. It’s valuable to have diversity in my team — not so much to have a woman. I consider what will make my team better. That can include personality. One of my CIOs brings consumer products experience into my team. One had supply chain experience and brought an engineering perspective. One of my CIOs has a Ph.D. in art history and was a curator at [New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art]. So it’s really looking at all the unique things that people bring.

How can companies attract young women to a career in IT?

It’s not unique to women, but it’s a problem, if you are talking about getting kids into the IT profession from an educational standpoint. There’s a lot in the media about outsourcing, and that gives misimpressions about the IT opportunity. That’s one dynamic that’s making people gravitate away from IT as a profession.

I recently had lunch with a group of female engineering students and asked what interested them in the engineering profession. It was a consistent view that the No. 1 thing to motivate them was their fathers. So there’s got to be a feeling of confidence when you come into a difficult profession, whether it is engineering or IT. That confidence is very important.

You mean their fathers instilled in them a sense of confidence?

Yes, because IT is hard — not that business isn’t hard or nursing isn’t hard. Confidence is a leadership quality. What the profession is about is problem-solving. It’s not about computation so much; it’s not only about programming, but about solving problems. Some of them are big, hairy business problems you are solving. Some are usability problems for products. There’s a lot of art and finesse that we don’t talk about when we try to attract women to the profession.

Is IT worker retention a concern for you?

We talk about retaining people every month in my operating reviews in China and India. In those regions, there’s a lot of job-shopping going on, so much that it reminds me of the heyday of the IT bubble, where people changed jobs every two months. For our growth and what we’re doing at Motorola in those regions, we need leaders on the ground and in IT. We need to support the growth of R&D, and we need to be where the work is. It’s very important, but it’s hard to retain them.

Any ideas on how to deal with that?

We don’t really know yet. It’s an emerging trend. We know that what motivates IT people is, “Does my customer really appreciate my work?” But how did we get to the point where we train a person and suddenly they go down the street for 20 percent to 30 percent increases in pay? It’s the nature of the markets there right now.

You have a strong education background in music and math. What do those have to do with preparation for IT work?

Music programs in schools are critical. I studied music and was a math major in college. I’m actually a right-brained person with a holistic way of looking at things. Music study tends to make you think differently about how things work together, whether orchestra, choral or theater. You learn it’s not the individual that makes the outcome, but it’s all the things working in harmony. That’s like running a project in IT or business.

How is IT at Motorola influencing the development of the company’s products?

Innovation comes from solving real customer problems. We use our own products, and we have a pretty significant impact on product development. Almost 6,000 Motorola Q handhelds have been adopted in our IT [operations] because it is an enterprise device with 23 apps running on it.

What handheld device do you use?

I use a 3G Q, announced recently. I use it for e-mail and voice and for everything. As a matter of fact, I rely less and less on my laptop. I would take a laptop if I were doing a big Word document or a spreadsheet, but I’m not a big spreadsheet junkie. I have to tell you, I don’t see a lot of need to have a laptop. I travel about 60 percent of the time all over the world. [The handheld] works in all the networks around the world, but not Japan, which is unique. But I can get applications on the Q and can deploy to the Q anything I can move through our mobile portals. I can do approvals for workflow and see my reports. I can do a NetMeeting live on a Q. The BlackBerry is a fabulous e-mail device, but there’s a lot I can’t do on it.

How is the integration work going following the recent acquisitions of Good Technology and Symbol Technologies?

I’m intimately involved with that. We’ve started to create a repeatable process for integrating companies. For example, with Symbol, you do basic things right away, like HR integration and setting up e-mail and Internet. For things like product portfolio integration and order-taking integration, we’ve started using business process management tools to create dialogue around where the processes of the two companies intersect and how to create revenue synergy. That has gone really well. BPM has been very helpful. We’ve also learned it doesn’t pay to just rip out one of the ERP systems of the two companies being merged. We use parts of both ERP systems.

What does Motorola do best, and what does it most need to improve upon?

I really think having innovation at the core of the culture here is very powerful for Motorola. You see it everywhere you go, in every function, and not just R&D. It’s an empowering environment to work in. [CEO] Ed Zander has made Motorola exciting and fast-paced, and it permeates the culture. If you talk to people who’ve been here a long time, they see an enormous difference.

In terms of improvements, the thing that makes me most crazy is the big company bureaucracy, which is not unique to Motorola. Sometimes IT people want to control everything for good reasons, such as securing company information. But the company also faces tough competing demands, especially in the consumer market. So my challenge is solving the bureaucracy and finding ways to free it up.

Search for top stars of professions for contest

THE search is on for people with vocational skills to enter a citywide contest next year covering 180 professions, ranging from car repairs to Web-page design.

Ninety-six winners of last year’s contest stepped up yesterday to receive their awards, according to the Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau.

Nearly 9,000 people signed up to take part in last year’s contest, including digital machine operators, fashion designers and hairdressers.

“About 80 percent of the participants were workers in enterprises, and most of them are working in the front line,” said Zhu Yanmin, an official in the Shanghai Vocational Skill Testing Center, which sponsored the contest.

“But there is a trend for more university students to take part in the contest, as they realize the importance of raising their vocational abilities,” Zhu said.

Nearly 4,000 participants who were identified as qualified in the contest have been granted professional qualification certificates by the Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau, without having to sit a qualification exam.

Xuhui District won the gold medal yesterday for organizing 1,191 participants, with 14 people making the top three places in the contest’s final round.

Workers in enterprises, students and the unemployed in the city can sign up for the competition.

“We also encourage foreigners in the city to participate in the contest, but there were none having yet registered,” said Zhu.

Participants can sign up for next year’s preliminary contest at their local vocational training centers.

Google on a search for engineers in China

BEIJING: Google, owner of the world’s most-used Internet search site, is planning to more than double the number of engineers it has in China to help win users in the world’s second- biggest Internet market.

The company aims to have between 200 and 300 engineers in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai in a year’s time, Google China’s president, Lee Kai-fu, said after a press briefing Friday in Beijing. Google has more than 100 engineers in the nation, he said.

Google plans to hire “thousands of people” for its Beijing development center to create services for China’s more than 137 million Internet users, the company’s chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, said last April. The Mountain View, California, company added online map and Internet spreadsheet services last month in a bid to catch Beijing’s Baidu.com, which has a China market share three times larger than Google’s.

“Google is already hiring people away from Baidu,” Florian Pihs, assistant vice-president at the Beijing-based researcher Analysys International, said Friday by telephone.

“Google is after people who are highly coveted not only by Baidu,” but by Microsoft other companies, Pihs said.

The search company is planning to open a development center in Shanghai this summer, Google’s Lee said, declining to provide further details. An announcement about the center will be made in a few weeks, he said.

In the fourth quarter, Google’s share of the Chinese search market rose to 17 percent from 16 percent in the previous three-month period, according to Analysys. Baidu’s share rose to 58 percent from 57 percent, while Yahoo!’s was unchanged at 13 percent.

Google on Friday began offering a service that allows users to search for information in Chinese-language books, Lee said. The company began offering search services for mobile phones in December last year in partnership with China Mobile, the nation’s biggest wireless carrier.

In January, Google bought a stake in Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, a Chinese company that helps users download movies, music and software from the Internet.

Baidu’s search revenue could grow 15 percent on a quarterly basis during 2007, slower than Google’s rate in China of between 20 percent and 25 percent, according to a Feb. 2 Credit Suisse report.

By Dune Lawrence and John Liu Bloomberg