To hire employees in China quickly and build local teams, companies need to understand how to navigate the local labour market and cater to the desires and needs of employees. This goes for both recruiting and retaining employees in China.
At Acadia Advisory we help our clients understand the local hiring landscape and the expectations of the local workforce. We put our clients in a position that enables them to attract qualified candidates.
Candidates are increasingly looking for opportunities that offer not only financial rewards but also future growth prospects, work stability, and a work culture that matches their lifestyle.
Understanding the Local Hiring Environment
Hiring in China has many nuances, one simply being that China has two important recruitment seasons. They are the Spring Peak season from March to April and the Autumn Peak season from September to October. These two seasons are an opportunity for employers to recruit new talent. These seasons are driven by fresh graduates entering the labor market and times when employees may be considering career changes for the following year.
The Chinese labor market is continuously evolving and increasingly becoming more competitive.
Competition for skilled professionals – High-tech industries such as green energy, artificial intelligence, and robotics command high salary expectations, which often leads to talent pools being concentrated in only a handful of large companies that can afford high employee salaries and other expectations.
Shifting job market trends – While some sectors in China are experiencing talent shortages, others see an oversupply of applicants, which can be an opportunity to secure skilled candidates at competitive compensation rates.
Complex hiring and compliance processes – Companies must ensure that their recruitment practices are compliant with Chinese labour laws, and also ensure that applicants are vetted with background checks conducted to mitigate any potential risks.
How Acadia Advisory helps companies build teams in China
At Acadia Advisory, we utilize our talent networks, leverage our market expertise, and utilize data-driven technologies to help our clients attract suitable candidates effectively and quickly.
We don’t just help our clients to source suitable candidates, we develop strategic hiring strategies tailored to their recruitment needs and make them attractive to the local labour market.
Credibility is important when hiring in China, and we help our clients to build credibility and a brand reputation that give confidence to new potential candidates.
Market-Driven Recruitment Adjustments: Case Study
We assisted a green-energy company entering China that quickly needed to recruit Chinese employees for their procurement and engineering teams. They were facing difficulty in finding suitable candidates as their requirements were very specific, with most qualified for the job already employed by major corporations.
Recruitment Strategy Adjustment: We advised our client to allow us to expand the potential candidate pool by not only targeting specific engineers but also other engineer candidates who had experience in similar projects with strong English language skills. This allowed the company to hire skilled engineers slightly outside of their initial requirements.
Hiring competent engineers with strong English language skills was successful, as it enabled the company’s internal design teams to provide technical guidance and training to them.
Our client also needed to hire Chinese procurement professionals. Procurement roles in China have a history of commanding high salaries; however, a slowdown in a similar industry led to the availability of skilled procurement professionals. We were able to identify experienced procurement professionals and approached them with attractive yet cost-effective offers from our client.
This case is one example of how we can utilize our experience and understanding of the Chinese labour market, hiring processes, and candidate expectations to help our clients hire quickly and effectively.
Our Comprehensive HR Solutions
We provide a full suite of comprehensive HR solutions to our clients beyond recruitment to enable them to succeed in hiring and retaining employees in China.
Across our suite of HR solutions, we combine our industry expertise and insights into domestic recruitment and employment to support international companies hiring and building teams in China.
