sunny 2007-3-13 10:43 AM
Recruiting on Asian Job Boards
[i]With Internet access spreading across Asia, employers can tap a growing array of online sites for sourcing candidates.
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By Fay Hansen
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Vault.com is a well-established hunting ground for job candidates looking for U.S. job postings and inside information on employers. Recruiters post 500,000 openings a month on the site’s job board and monitor the message boards to track candidate and employee postings about their company.I lU
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Vault analyzed its traffic data in 2005 and discovered that many of the users on its U.S. site were job seekers in Asia looking for career information and insider perspectives on U.S multinationals. To meet this obvious need, Vault launched its Asia site a year ago. Vault Asia now averages more than 200,000 unique visitors a month and posts jobs for employers across Asia.
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Recruiters and job seekers can now find detailed information on the interview process for a technician at Ikea in Shenzhen, China, or the signing bonus for engineers at Qualcomm in Hyderabad, India. New hires freely report their experiences with the recruiting process and salary offers at major companies.
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This year, Vault will break up the Vault Asia site into targeted sites for individual countries, with new sites for India, China and South Korea going live in the first quarter of 2007.lM&K+nvth[
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"Hiring is through the roof in Asia, particularly in China and India," says Edward Shen, general manager of Vault Asia.
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Vault is part of the boom in career sites and job boards that is sweeping Asia. Internet recruiting has become a primary recruiting method in China and India, where economic growth is fueling nonstop hiring across all industries.
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Recruiters are posting on the sites as soon as they appear. On January 11, NewChinaCareer.com went live. One month later, postings on the site for jobs in China included 296 positions at Microsoft, 320 at IBM and 492 at GE. Recruiters are using the site to source candidates with fluency in English for jobs in all the major cities in mainland China plus Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
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Job growth is explosive across Asia. China’s major cities generated 12 million new jobs in 2006, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China. GDP growth in China hit 10.7 percent in 2006, a full point above expectations.c+{;G(hH^,k1g&IV
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India reported GDP growth of 9.2 percent for 2006 and surpassed South Korea to become Asia’s third-largest economy, after Japan and China. Job growth is soaring at both foreign and Indian multinationals.
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"Accenture is hiring 500 people a month in Bangalore alone," Shen says.-o1i0Fci6q&Z)\
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This volume of hiring is possible only when sourcing is fully automated through employment sites. The major players are job boards such as ChinaHR.com, which posts nearly 1 million jobs each day and offers 10 million registered job seekers. ChinaHR, the oldest employment site in China, sold a 40 percent stake in the site to Monster.com in 2005.
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Recruit.net, a fully trilingual job search engine based in Hong Kong, posts 2 million jobs a month in English, Chinese and Japanese for positions in China, Japan, Australia, India and Singapore.
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"Throughout Asia, the major job sites are becoming very important parts of the culture of each country," Shen says. "They have a major presence through advertising."
sunny 2007-3-13 10:43 AM
The number of Internet users in Asia is approaching 400 million, up 241 percent from 2000, according to Internet World. Although the Asian Internet penetration rate is only 10.5 percent overall, penetration in South Korea, Singapore and Japan is roughly equivalent to the U.S. rate of 69.6 percent.Y7MDN\5J8aB
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China had 137 million Internet users by the end of 2006, up 23 percent from 2005, according to the China Internet Information Center. In Beijing and Shanghai, penetration is approaching 40 percent; in Hong Kong, it is 68.2 percent.3U%_0lux^
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"In India and China, Internet use among the younger generation is at the same level as in the United States," Shen reports. "Our surveys of Vault’s Asian members show that they are starved for information about careers and employers. The focus on careers among recent graduates is greater than what we see in the United States."
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Rapid growth and high turnover drive constant recruiting. "Young professionals in China will change jobs two or three times a year and leave a company for a small salary increase at another company," Shen says.1\xR3IjD
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Private-sector wages in China rose 11.4 percent for the year ending in the third quarter of 2006, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China..K?.w/[%f0A
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High demand is balanced by a high supply. Vault’s recruiting contacts in China and India report that the supply of candidates is strong and that many companies say they have too many applicants.
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"InfoSys in India had 1.3 million applicants in 2006, with a large portion of this coming in through the company’s Web site," Shen notes. "Young professionals are focused on brands, so a company like InfoSys receives many résumés."