Increasingly, young professionals are making the jump from multinational companies to homegrown tech houses
Multinationals are continuing to lose out to local companies when it comes to securing high-quality professionals in China, especially amid domestic tech firms’ surging success, according to the 2018 China Leadership Report.
“Local Chinese companies are redefining our entire way of thinking about the talent market as they continue to attract leaders based on experience, salary, training and opportunities, which go hand-in-hand with their fast-growing operations and opportunities,” said James Root, a partner at global consultancy Bain and Co and co-author of the report.
Over the past five years, roughly 40 percent of business leaders at director level or above who began a job at a local company moved there from a foreign enterprise, according to the survey, which conducted by Bain and professional networking site Linked-In China.
That figure had risen notably from a 2016 survey, when less than one-third of the leaders had moved in that direction.
The wider gap is the result of growth in the Chinese economy and the fact that employees at all levels are looking for a greater say in leadership decisions, the report said.
Bain analyzed 66,000 business leaders in LinkedIn China’s proprietary member database. The sample set came from 350 major corporations across 18 industries, from manufacturing to modern services.
The survey found that this talent flow is even more pronounced among those under 35 years old, challenging a long-held view that fresh Chinese graduates and young local professionals usually seek formal development opportunities at multinational corporations, where they can gain cross-functional and international experience.
Chinese nationals like to be involved in businesses’ decision-making processes, prefer a faster working pace and want more opportunities to explore international markets, all of which are becoming more achievable at local companies, said the head of human resources for a multinational healthcare company, who asked not to be named.
“In multinational companies, Chinese business leaders usually take very operational roles” as opposed to real leadership positions, the report cited a regional HR head at a global engineering firm with operations in China as saying. Chinese leaders want to contribute their ideas but can feel constrained by global, top-down decision-making, the person said.
Meanwhile, China’s emerging tech houses, from taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing to TikTok operator Byte-Dance, have become the latest magnets to draw the attention of talented professionals.
The report found that one-third of business leaders are under the age of 35, as opposed to just 20 percent in the overall sample.
They are also more likely to be graduates from the C9, a bloc of nine highly regarded Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.
By choosing to work at a Chinese company, leaders can expect to have a more hands-on role in key decision-making and corporate strategy – an opportunity that is very appealing to many business leaders, especially younger ones who are still building their experience, said Lin Hua, general manager of LinkedIn Talent Solutions at LinkedIn China.
But George Huang, chief human resources officer at SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, cautioned business leaders at multinationals to stay humble and “think clearly about how to bring value to local companies”.
(China Daily European Weekly 12/21/2018 page31)