Interview with Doron Vermaat of NewChinaCareer.com

At Asia Pacific Headhunter, we try to be a source of useful information for those wanting to work, network or research career opportunities and the recruiting/executive search market in Asia Pacific.  I'm working on putting together a series of interviews with some key people in the recruiting industry giving insight into the uniqueness of the Asia Pacific market.

As we know, the recruitment market, especially the online job boards in China has been heating up over the past couple years with the increasing demand and shortage of talent - read Workforce.com's article on Recruiting on Asian Job Boards.

So to get behind the scenes, first up is Doron Vermaat, Managing Director of English-only China-based online job board NewChinaCareer.com which started up early this year. He talks about the online job board market in Asia, the importance of English as the medium, and gives some advice for both employers and candidates.

1. Doron, can you tell me a bit about yourself and NewChinaCareer.com?

I’m a Dutch national and have been working in the field of online recruitment for quite a while. I was part of internet startup NationaleVacaturebank.nl, a leading Dutch job board that was acquired by VNU Business Publications in late 2005. When I left after the buy-out I joined an international recruitment company where I was responsible for all online and offline marketing and branding strategies. When they wanted to expand their business to the APAC region, I found out that there wasn’t a serious English language online recruitment platform for the Greater China region. The idea for NewChinaCareer.com was born.

NewChinaCareer.com went live in January 2007 and is currently listing over 15,000 (mostly executive) jobs from over 400 companies.

2. Why come to Asia to start a job board?

We’ve been seeing the growth of online recruitment in Europe for some time now. On this side of the world, I also expect the trend to continue.  (The number of Internet users in Asia is approaching 400 million, up 241 percent from 2000, according to Internet World.)

There’s more and more demand for native English speakers by foreign companies but also by local Chinese operations who are increasingly looking to do list in Europe and the US. We are also seeing that there are a large number of Chinese students who have studied overseas and are looking for jobs back in China. NewChinaCareer.com hopes to capitalise on the fact that English will be their medium of application preference.

 3. With the boom of career sites and online job boards coming out of China, how does NewChinaCareer.com set itself apart from the other big players in Asia, such as ChinaHr.com, 51job, JobsDB etc, etc?

 Although we are new on the scene, there’s no doubt that we are already a serious player in the market. By using English as a platform medium, I am positive that NewChinaCareer.com will appeal to a particular type of sought-after professional in Greater China. For both jobseekers and recruiters, as far as I’m concerned, there is now no other alternative.

There are a variety of job boards out there, but normally the English they use is just for the site’s menus. When you get down to the details of the listing, it can often be very disappointing for users who don’t read Chinese. We offer an easy, one-stop shop for China’s top jobs and China’s top professionals.

We did a lot of research in China and it seems that the top-end multinationals are all desperate for highly-educated people. One of the things that helps us, is that because we are an English-language site, we have a built-in selection filter. You can’t post or apply on the site if you can’t read or write English.

For years, more and more expatriates, highly-educated locals and returning students have been seeking top positions in Chinese companies. By using English, the site is in the exclusive position of being able to narrow down a particular type of candidate and vacancy.

4. How do you find the online recruiting market in Greater China different from other markets, such as the US or Europe? Or is it not different at all?

The volume is extreme. 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. Another thing that surprised me at first was the usability and the look and feel of most China based job boards: Looking at them is like walking through a Hong Kong night market, with every neon advertisement hoarding trying to capture your attention.

5. What do you think are the biggest issues facing employers hiring in Greater China from an online recruiting perspective?

Hiring is through the roof in Asia, particularly in China and India.

China’s major cities generated 12 million new jobs in 2006, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China. This volume of hiring is possible only when sourcing is fully automated through employment sites.

Multinationals recruiting for professional positions on local job boards like ChinaHR.com and Zhaopin receive an extraordinarily large volume of responses and need to be prepared to target individuals.

6. What about employees? What do you think is the most important thing they should know about using the internet to find a new job in Asia?

 Be careful with using social networks to jump start your career. They attract millions of visitors every month providing lots of opportunity for individual interaction and relationship building. While this activity is indeed networking, however, the most important aspect of its description is the adjective that defines it: "social."  They should be aware that it can harm their reputation or even jeopardize their employment if their profile is full of pictures from late night party adventures or other “social” activities.

7. There is a lot of argument in the recruiting industry at least about the effectiveness of job boards. Certainly they provide a cost benefit over print advertising but they have proven to not necessarily be great source of talent. Still the huge advantage I personally see for job boards is the ability to tweak a product over time and improve. Where do you see the greatest changes and improvements coming from for Job Boards and online recruitment within Asia in the near future?

 I personally think you can only deliver a large percentage of qualified candidates if you are a niche player with a certain focus.  The problem with the large general job boards will always be the extremely large amount of unqualified candidates that apply to their clients' job postings. The biggest challenges for these job boards is to help their clients to filter this large amount of applicants. 

8. There seems to be a lot of ways that job boards are trying to change online over the last few years, with advertising on social networking sites, vertical search, paid referral systems, and social networking sites that are also job boards (phew, that was a mouthful). Despite all this change and creativity many of the larger players strictly advertising based services still continue to produce excellent revenue results. What's your opinion on all the new models that are appearing? How much is hype and how much is here to stay, or ahead of it's time?

So far the most successful job boards in terms of revenue are still the traditional web1.0 job boards like Monster.com, Careerbuilder and for Greater China ChinaHR and Zhaopin.com.

From a user's perspective I do believe in vertical job search engines like indeed.com or social networking sites like LinkedIN, but as an entrepreneur I prefer to make some money. Something that still seems to be a huge problem for web2.0 startups that are based on the Freemium business model.

9. Doron, do you think Headhunters like me (and Harry Joiner) are eventually doomed to be replaced by the internet or online savvy guys like you and Joel Cheesman?

Definitely not. I think that especially recruitment agencies and headhunters like you benefit from recruitment tools like job boards and social business networks. Besides this there will always be positions that can not be filled by companies themselves, simply because they don’t have the expertise. I think guys like me and Joel are serving both the HR community and the recruiters / headhunters but I am convinced that the last will benefit most. Simply because it’s their core business.

10. I really appreciate you talking with me Doron, is there anything else you'd like to add about NewChinaCareer.com?

 Thanks for having me Steven.

And thanks to Doron for taking the time to answer my questions.

 

Comments

[Chan Chi Sang]

I think that building a English only job site for China is rather like building a Japanese only job site for the USA.

Sure China is a huge market but by restricting your site to English you can at most reach 0.5% of that market.

[Steven Kempton]

Good point Chi Sang, but trying to attack the market of all Chinese speaking candidates is basically impossible at this point. Cutting down that into a reasonable niche I think is pretty intelligent from them. Although, it's yet to be seen whether the niche of "english users" is a good one. I think there is a still some room for a much more focused option.