Chinese Job-Search Mismatch
This year, executives at Shell (China) Ltd. waded through more than 6,000 resumes, interviewed several hundred finalists and will eventually hire nine college graduates from the class of 2004. "Given the size of the country, there should be enough high-talent people," says Wang Jing, the company's human-resources manager in Beijing. "The challenge is to find them and bring them in."
At a Beijing job fair this month, three newly minted graduates of Beijing University of Technology wandered among the booths and pronounced themselves disappointed. "We have taken part in 11 job fairs," said one of the three, a 22-year-old marketing major. "They are no good. They are not geared toward our interests at all."
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China's economy is growing nearly 10% a year. Yet many of the country's 2.8 million graduates complain they can't find a job worthy of the years and money they invested in higher education. On the other side, companies are pushed to cumbersome and often extreme measures to find people to run their rapidly expanding operations. The paradox highlights one of the growing pains of China's economy: a mismatch between the expectations of college graduates in an immature labor market and the demands of fast-growing companies.
Multinational companies selling everything from auditing services to biscuits and bottled water say the dearth of talented people is the No. 1 constraint on growth in China. "We need a lot more people than we have now, and we need higher-caliber people," says Guo Ming, Coca-Cola Co.'s human-resources director for Greater China, which is starting on-campus recruiting this year. "It's an extra burden for us to reach into the talent pool. It really slows us down." A top executive at Microsoft Corp. in Beijing made headlines this spring when he complained that he couldn't find enough high-caliber software engineers in a pool of more than 10,000 applicants.
Finding the right talent has always been a challenge in China, but there are signs that the situation is becoming more pressing now for many multinationals. When these companies set up shop, they relied more heavily on expatriate executives to head up departments and spearhead business expansion. But as companies have gained their footing and expanded rapidly into smaller cities, the demand for skilled local employees has increased. China now has a pool of professionals with experience working for multinationals, but they are still few, and fought over. Many companies opt to train new recruits from scratch, hiring talented graduates with an eye to grooming them for future management roles.
Cosmetics giant L'Oreal SA employs more than 3,000 people in China and has seen the business grow by more than 60% in each of the past two years. "Just to stay in the same position, your responsibility increases 60%," says Paolo Gasparrini, president and managing director of L'Oreal China.
The inability of China's graduates to find jobs has become a source of heated debate and hand-wringing. Newspaper coverage has tended toward the alarmist, featuring people with college diplomas offering to work free of charge or forced to take jobs in factories. Critics say a 1999 government policy to increase enrollment at colleges across the country is to blame for the graduate glut. This year, China had 2.8 million graduates from three-year colleges, four-year colleges and graduate schools combined -- double the number two years ago. Starting salaries for recent graduates are falling; average starting salaries for graduates with bachelor's degrees this year are down 28% from last year, according to Taihe Consulting Co., which specializes in human-resources consulting.
Yet simply blaming the expanded enrollment for the difficulty in finding a job may be simplistic, educators and labor experts say. In fact, China's fast-growing economy, with its huge appetite for professionals in fields like information technology and marketing, should be able to absorb the additional graduates. At the root of the mismatch is an education system, a labor market and a nation of college graduates all struggling to adapt to a fast-changing marketplace.
For much of the past half-century of Communist rule, the state was the sole employer; every college had a "job allocation office" responsible for placing students in positions at state-run enterprises for life. That system has unraveled with economic revisions, but not much has risen up to take its place. The country has very few job-placement agencies or temp agencies to which companies could turn to fill lower-level positions. There are some headhunting firms, but they generally focus on finding people at senior levels.
With the lack of intermediaries, college students often resort to attending endless rounds of job-recruitment fairs, at which companies set up booths to advertise positions and answer questions. The scattershot nature of such a search was apparent at a fair this month in Beijing, at which about 60 companies had set up booths. They included a modeling agency, an eyeglass factory, a maker of musical instruments and a department under Beijing's Communist Party committee. "There are not a lot of companies," said Dong Chenxia, a 21-year-old graduate in international trade, dressed neatly in checked pants and an embroidered shirt for her job search. "We graduates are very pitiful. The demands on us are higher and higher."
Colleges are trying to fill the gap. In recent years, schools have converted their "job allocation offices" into "student employment centers" and introduced services like on-campus recruitment fairs and career-planning seminars for students. But the task is new to them, and many school officials complain that they are overwhelmed and understaffed.
"Really, to help students find jobs should not be the university's responsibility, but because we are still in the developing stage, they force this responsibility on the universities," says Qian Wei, deputy director of the student-employment center at Capital Normal University in Beijing. From an office squeezed beside the campus badminton court, he and a staff of three must help 2,300 students in this year's graduating class find jobs.
The country's education system fails to prepare students for the working world, critics say. Chinese schools, long criticized for their heavy emphasis on rote learning and test scores, are working to overhaul their curricula to allow more creativity, but there is a long way to go. And in many business fields, the professors have little real-world experience of what they are teaching, because they came of age in a planned-economy world.
"Some of the professors at school, they never did marketing themselves," says a human-resources executive at a multinational company. "They learn it from books, then they teach it to others, then these people come to a big marketing company like us."
Students bear some of the blame for their difficulties, educators say. In the past, higher education was so elite that college graduates were virtually guaranteed plum jobs. While college is still far from a mainstream phenomenon -- 17% of 18- to 22-year-olds are currently enrolled in college, up from less than 10% five years ago -- prize jobs are no longer a given. Yet many students lack the initiative, skills and experience to enter the rough-and-tumble world of job-hunting. The practice of seeking out internships or summer jobs and writing cover letters also is alien to most of them.
A sense of entitlement sometimes comes across in interviews, employers say. "The students come and they ask, 'What will you do to develop us?' " says Olivia Pang, deputy general manager of accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd. in Shanghai, which hired 350 college graduates this year, mostly as auditors. "They expect that they are still in a classroom where they will sit for two weeks and get a certificate. You have to break them of this mentality."
Companies have found innovative ways to find and keep people. Since 1998, L'Oreal has done campus recruitment at China's top universities; this year, it hired 22 graduates. It has designed a one-year training program for them, assigning each new hire a mentor to help navigate the company culture and running courses on everything from communication skills to budgeting methods.
Executives say employees hired straight out of school tend to be more loyal, but concede they have little choice in the matter. "It's not that we don't want to hire someone with experience," says Mr. Gasparrini, L'Oreal's president in China. "Sometimes there are not many alternatives. For instance, it's even hard to find people with five years of marketing experience."
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu runs clubs at top universities in Beijing and Shanghai, sponsoring regular activities for juniors and seniors in hopes of identifying and landing the best ones upon graduation. While such investments may seem long-term, the payoffs are already apparent. This month, four of the people Ms. Pang interviewed and hired in 1992, the year the company set up its first China office, made partner.
"It's a milestone," she says.
中国求职市场矛盾重重
壳牌（中国）有限公司(Shell (China) Ltd.)管理人员今年辛苦浏览了6,000多份简历，挑选了几百人进行面试，最终将从中聘用9位2004届大学毕业生。“中国如此之大，应该有足够的高素质人才，”该公司驻北京的人力资源经理王晶说，“问题是如何找到他们并招他们过来。”
在本月北京举行的人才招聘会上，北京工业大学(Beijing University of Technology)的三名应届毕业生徘徊在各个招聘展位间，但最终倍感失望。“我们已经参加了11场人才招聘会，”其中一位22岁的市场营销专业毕业生说，“但是效果都不好。这些招聘会根本就不是面向我们的。”
中国经济以每年10%的速度增长。然而，该国280万大学毕业生中的许多人还是抱怨找不到一份能回报他们寒窗苦读投入大量金钱的高等教育。但另一方面，许多企业各显其能，有时甚至采用极端手腕来寻找合适人才，来满足公司业务迅猛扩张的所需。这种矛盾突出体现了伴随中国经济高速发展而共生的一个窘境：在发展未臻成熟的劳动力市场上，高校毕业生的求职预期和快速发展的企业招聘需求之间存在不对位。
跨国公司已深入到中国市场的各个领域，从审计服务到饼干和瓶装水。它们认为，高素质人才匮乏是阻碍中国经济继续发展的最大障碍。可口可乐公司(Coca-Cola Co.)大中国区人力资源总监郭明说，“我们需要招募更多人才，更多高水平人才。”可口可乐今年启动了校园招聘项目。“找寻高素质人才对我们来说成了一项额外负担。人才缺乏的确放缓了我们的业务发展。”微软公司(Microsoft Corp.)驻北京的一位高级管理人员今年春天的上述表示引起了强烈反响，他说在1万多份简历中微软也难以找出合乎要求的高水平软件工程师。
找到合适的人才在中国一直是个难题，有迹象显示对跨国公司而言这个问题变得日益迫切起来。初入中国市场时，它们派遣大批海外管理人员领导各个部门，拓展业务。但在站稳脚跟并开始迅速向小城市挺进时，就需要经验丰富技能高超的本地职员了。中国已经有了一批具备跨国公司工作经验的专业人士，但为数太少，而且被各企业竞相争夺。许多公司于是选择自行培训，从应届毕业生中招募新人，逐步培养成未来的公司管理人员。
化妆品巨头欧莱雅(L'Oreal SA)在中国雇佣了3,000多名员工，过去两年每年业务增幅均超过60%。欧莱雅中国(L'Oreal China)总裁兼董事总经理盖保罗(Paolo Gasparrini)说，“这就意味著，如果职位不变，每个员工肩上的责任每年就增加了60%。”
中国应届毕业生求职难已经成了一件棘手的问题，引起社会各界的积极讨论。报纸做的一些报导往往杞人忧天，纷纷炒作那些只要工作不要工资、或者被迫到工厂工作的大学毕业生的事迹。批评人士将之归咎于政府1999年全面扩招的政策。今年，从大专生、本科生到研究生的各类应届毕业生人数将达到280万，是两年前的两倍。毕业生的起薪开始下滑。人力资源顾问公司太和顾问(Taihe Consulting Co.)的数据显示，今年本科毕业生的起薪较去年下降了28%。
但是，教育界和人力资源领域的专家认为，一味抱怨政府的扩招政策未免流于简单化了。实际上，迅猛发展的中国经济应该能够消化就业市场上的新增应届毕业生，信息科技和市场营销等领域就需要大量专业人士。导致供需不对称的根本还在于市场日新月异的发展，中国的教育体系、劳动力市场以及全国大学生都在努力调整来应对市场变化。
在过去这半个世纪中国共产党执政的多数时期，政府是唯一的雇主，每所大学都设有“工作分配办公室”，负责将应届毕业生分配到各个国有企业的终身工作岗位上。经济改革动摇了这套分配体系，但还没有促生出一套能够完全替代的系统。中国很少有能让企业寻找到合适低层职位人选的职业介绍机构或此类临时机构。而零星出现的一些猎头公司通常瞄准的都是高级管理职位。
由于缺少中介机构，毕业生们要赶场参加各类人才招聘会，招聘企业在这里摆摊设点，介绍职位空缺并解答各类问题。这种广泛撒网的特点在本月北京召开的一次人才招聘会表现得再明显不过了。大约60家公司参加了招聘会，其中有模特经纪公司、眼镜厂、乐器厂，还有北京市党委的一个下属机构。21岁的国际贸易专业毕业生董晨霞（音译）说，这次招聘企业不多。为了这次求职，她精心挑选服饰，精美的刺绣衬衫搭配格子长裤。她说，“毕业生很惨，招聘企业的要求越来越高了。”
学校方面也采取措施尽力弥补这种差距。近年来，许多学校都把原来的工作分配办公室转化成学生就业指导中心，向学生提供校园招聘会和职业规划等多项服务。但对老师们来说，这可是一项新任务新挑战，学校的许多管理人士都说需求太多而人手紧缺。
“其实，帮助毕业生求职不应该是学校的责任，但因为一切还处于发展阶段，我们不得不承担起这份责任。”首都师范大学(Capital Normal University)就业中心副主任钱伟说。就业指导中心位于学校羽毛球场一侧，逼□的空间里他和三位老师要帮助全校2,300名应届毕业生找工作。
批评人士称，中国的教育体制未能帮助学生做好毕业后参加工作的准备。中国的各所大学长期以来都是著重于死记硬背式的教育和学习方式，以考试成绩为上，这些做法一直备受批评。现在学校开始调整课程设置，鼓励发展学生的创造性，但这是一条漫长的道路。许多商业课程的教授在他们所教的领域几乎没有什么实践经验，因为他们生活成长的年代还是计划经济时代。
“有些教授自己就从来没做过市场营销工作，”某跨国公司人力资源部门主管说，“他们的知识都来自书本，然后再教给学生，再然后这些学生就到了像我们这样的大型营销企业。”
教育界人士认为，学生对此也有责任。以前，中国的高等教育是精英教育，大学毕业生基本上保证会有不错的工作机会。虽然现在高等教育远未普及－－只有17%的18到22岁的年轻人能够接受高等教育，较5年前不到10%的比例略有提高－－但好工作不再是水到渠成的事了。然而，还有许多学生缺乏创新意识且经验不足，难以应对当前粗放混乱的就业市场。对他们中的许多人来说，寻找实习或夏季短期工作机会，准备求职信等等还很陌生。
招聘方表示，学生的优越感还不时会在招聘过程中出现。德勤会计师行(Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd.)驻上海的副总经理Olivia Pang就说，“学生们来到这里，他们问“你们将如何来发展我们？”。德勤今年招募了350名大学毕业生，多数都是审计员。Olivia Pang说，“他们还以为他们继续置身于教室，坐在那听上两周课，然后拿张证书。你不得不打破他们这种观念。”
企业也在为招聘和留住人才而寻求各种创新方法。1998年以来，欧莱雅就在中国名校展开校园招聘活动，今年通过这种方式一共招聘了22人。欧莱雅针对他们设计了一套为期一年的培训计划，为每一位新员工安排一名导师，帮助他们熟悉公司文化，学习从交流技巧到预算编制等各项课程。
公司管理人士认为，直接从校园招募的员工会对公司更加忠诚，不过他们也表示之所以这样作是因为几乎别无选择。“并不是我们不想招聘有经验的员工，”欧莱雅中国总裁盖保罗说，“有时候就是没得可选。比如说，现在要想找一名有5年营销经验的人就很困难。”
德勤则在北京和上海的著名高校成立了俱乐部，赞助各项定期举办的由大三和大四学生参加的活动，以便在他们毕业时挑选最佳人才。这看起来是一项长期投资，但已经取得了明显收效。德勤1992年在中国成立了第一家办事处，当时经Pang面试录取的4名毕业生本月成为了公司合伙人。
“这是一个里程碑，”她说。
