China Recruitment Marketing

A few days ago, I had a short conversation with my dear friend in Google China, who was pushed crazy with a recruitment delivery target for more than 80 open positions in the remaining days of this year.

China was the fastest growing country in terms of membership registration on Linkedin by Oct. 2008. IBM China Alumni's registration number on Linkedin ranks number one against other key IT MNC players. From that, you can tell social networking is coming in vogue in China, which leads us to think over a new model for talent sourcing, candidate relationship management and branding promotion. If you believe this trend, you might start thinking about the topic: Social network should be explored and utilized as one key recruitment channel for sourcing qualified talents to meet your company's hyper growth demand.

Days ago, I downloaded one survey report issued by Jobvite who is a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions. This survey has been published in 2008 which is focusing on social recruitment. Social recruitment is the practice of leveraging social and professional networks, online and offline, for talent acquisition. The survey shows that companies are increasingly tapping social networks to find employees. But most have yet to implement a comprehensive social recruitment strategy that fully leverages companies' most valuable social networks – those of their employees.

In this article, I want to talk about how to take advantage of virtual world learning environment as the new employee assimilation tool, the objective is to make it easier and faster to train a huge influx of new employees — allowing them to quickly understand IBM’s policies, culture, products and services, decision-making regimens and technical skills they need to be productive, as well as build out their social networks.

Usually recruiters can build profile on the social network, upload contacts into social network or begin to search and link to people online. Also, they gain access to individuals and updated status reports or contact information and they can create groups of people that helps to organize and/or broadcast messages out to. Other social network sites, like Facebook, recruiter can embed Dynamic Job Feed into Profile, which automatically updates profile page daily with new jobs from corporate career site. The page will link candidates back to the career site to view job and begin application process.

As the recruitment professionals, if we all have a concensus about the fact web 1.0 has been passing away and we see the tendency of the times is web 2.0, will you still hang around the channel (Web 1.0) rather than the platform (web 2.0)? I believe if we cannot change our mind to catch up the trend, we will most likely pay more for less in terms of recruitment ROI. Therefore, it's  your time to take actions to move from recruitment 1.0 to recruitment 2.0 because we are entering a new digital ecosystem.

Have you ever thought about your ROI is worthy of your money in terms of pay-to-post on job boards? The answer is uncertain when more and more companies struggle in the China talent market war. Year by year, we keep paying lot of money for posting on job boards, but we get less and less qualified candidates. Shall we keep doing this or change our mindset to another meansurement, which is called "Pay for Performance"?

In last article, I introduced one type of Virtual Recruitment Fairs which distributed company info, positions, videos as well as application forms through a CD together with a technical manazine to target audience. This is something more like an e-magazine, which IBM China did lots in its campus recruitment. Last year, we put a special designed e-magazine into a CD and distributed thousands to our target students in target universities, which gave students a whole picture about IBM China and its campus recruitment. This powerful CD generates lots of interests for students to participate on campus talk later and apply for our internship positions.

It’s the 2009 job fair for graduates in Henan province recently, which provided more than 6000 positions by 280 companies. Only in the first day, there were more than 10,000 students in the rush to get in. I guess people outside China have never seen this. Let's have a look at how crowded it is....

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