For the last 4 days I have been in snowy Beijing and I just arrived in diametrically opposed tropical Singapore and replaced scarf for shades and gloves for shorts.
In Beijing I was training over 30 recruiters how to source and during the course of two full days of sourcing got a chance with experimenting with Chinese character sourcing and Chinese cultural approaches to passive candidate sourcing. I made a lot of new friends and got a brief but brillant glimpse into the Chinese sourcing market. Some of the things I took note of were:
-string searching is best done in Baidu and instead of using operators and modifers in English and then using local language key words it's best to write the operators and modifiers if possible in only Chinese characters are only in English... hybrid strings seem to confuse the search engine
-Baidu and Alibaba(the 2nd biggest search engine) look like they use full Boolean syntax. Another popular is Sogou.
-www.QQ.com the 9th biggest web site in the world, by individual visitors per day, is not really used for industry sourcing and is more a competitor to Microsoft's IM rather than anything else
-51jobs.com is the most popular job board
-LinkedIn and Facebook are growing but www.kaixin001.com,www.hainei.com and
www.xiaonei.com are more popular.
-Mobile is on the move and instant messages is becoming popular to contact ggraduate candidates.
-Minimum wage per month is around 700 yuan or 80 euros per month in a lot of country based manufacturing companies
-20 million people have lost their jobs as a result of the global recession.
