Starting Your China Executive Search? – Start With These Questions (China executive recruiting the right way)

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Western executives ask me fairly regularly what my sector focus is. And that’s a fair question in a talent rich, mature market like the U.S., where a major challenge is paring a long list of well-qualified candidates down to a manageable set of best choices. Someone intimately familiar with your industry or sector can help you make those distinctions.

But China isn’t the U.S.. China is a talent scarce market. The challenge is not slicing through a large surplus of highly qualified candidates and eliminating all but the best. It is constructing and executing an effective, well-crafted, tailored plan that will lead you to a sufficient number of well-qualified, highly motivated candidates attracted to your particular offering – executives who are as likely to come from outside your immediate sector as within. In this scenario, a recruiting partner with a narrow sector focus may not serve you as well as it might in the U.S.

So, when you’re recruiting in China, you need to ask entirely different questions – ones that will help you navigate a talent scarce market, and move you closer to hiring great candidates and growing your business… Here are some initial questions to ask your search partner...

> “Will you actually do all the work on my search?”

> “What percentage candidate can I expect from you?” (top 5-10%?)

> “Can you define that top 5-10% for me?”

> “How will you get to know our company’s culture so you can bring us tight-fit candidates?”

> “What, in your view, is our value proposition for this role in the China market?”

> “What do you believe will be our biggest challenge in recruiting for this role?”

> “What would you suggest we do to defeat that challenge?”

The answers to these will begin to move you into a much stronger position to decide on the best recruiting firm for you in China, and in turn, make it much more probable that you’ll hire good people for your company as a consequence.

These are questions that none of your rivals are asking – giving you a huge hiring advantage at zero extra cost. But it’s entirely up to you to extract advantage from it.

If you might be hiring in China in the coming 3 - 24 months and you believe more insights like these would help you hire better people, call or shoot me any questions you have via email.