Zhaopin.com CEO Presents Report on China's Job Market at China Best Employer Awards Event

BEIJING, Dec. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Zhaopin.com China Best Employer Award 2013 (best.zhaopin.com), often referred to as the "Oscars" of China's human resources sector, has successfully came to a conclusion in Sanya on China's Hainan Island. Thanks to leadership of co-organizers Zhaopin.com and Peking University's Corporate Social Responsibility and Employer Brand Communication Research Center in their respective fields, the event proved to be even more successful than expected. In addition to relating the broad experience of the employers who have done the best jobs in building their brands and praising the outstanding achievements of these employers' HR departments, the event solicited opinions from job seekers and from the general public about who the best employers are and ensured its authority by deploying a rigorous and scientific methodology that assured a just and fair selection process.

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At the award ceremony, Zhaopin.com CEO Evan Guo presented a report highlighting the results of an analysis evidencing the closeness of the relationship between China's job market and the country's overall economy during 2013. The report used Zhaopin.com's extensive statistics and looked at the impact of China's macroeconomic situation by including companies in different industries, of different sizes and under different forms of incorporation and by analyzing the changes in the hiring practices at these various companies. CEO Guo and the invited guests then spoke at a forum that focused on what companies needed to change as a result of the trends that were revealed through the results of the best employer survey. The attendees reached a consensus that China's human resources sector is ever-evolving along with the overall economic situation and that companies need to pay most attention to their "people" first and foremost. The previous rather simplistic model of labor relations no longer meets talent recruitment and management needs. Employees and job seekers are attaching more importance as to whether a company can grant them more respect and greater room for personal development, as evidenced by the emergence of the "Workplace Maslow Phenomenon". The public survey found that compared to 2012, a just and fair employment policy, opportunities to improve individual abilities and a work-life balance, among other forms of soft power, are the factors of most concern. As a result, corporate HR departments need to focus more on their people and improve their internal management systems. At the same time, it behooves them to perfect their employer brand, both internally and externally, according to Zhaopin.com's expert advice for the sector. This is the mission and responsibility assigned by the human resource industry to Zhaopin.com and to corporate HR departments.

The report indicated that the fluctuations in China's overall economic situation have a very similar effect on the human resources sector as they do on corporate business performance. In terms of the hot sectors that dominate China's economy, the rapidly growing finance and real estate sectors are growing at a much faster pace than the national average with a year-over-year growth of 26 percent. More opportunities have enabled small businesses to emerge as a new force, with those with 20 or more employees experiencing the fastest growth. Meanwhile, companies with 10,000 or more employees are experiencing a 94 percent growth rate. Regionally, due to policies handed down by the state and to the saturated economic environment, companies in eastern China face a structural slowdown. As a result, the proportion of job seekers in the region who are college graduates continues to decrease and job seekers are expressing a preference for jobs in locations other than Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Benefiting from the "Western Development" strategy, western China has seen rapid growth, while central China has also achieved good results, with the result that the two regions are overtaking eastern China as the most popular destinations for job seekers.

Accordingly, it is not hard to observe that changes in demands for talent, a result of macro-economic fluctuations, have entered a re-shuffling stage. More recent factors such as the slower economic growth and changes in population policies give rise to fluctuations in types of recruitment needs, pushing employees and the job-seeking public to prioritize the value of job safety in their job searches and in their overall considerations. With the disappearance of the demographic dividend, high employment costs are pushing companies into a difficult situation in their competition for talent. A number of adverse factors force companies who view the quality of their labor pool as a key to their survival to place heightened importance on promoting from within. In the future, as companies continually go through reorganizations and changes in the organization charts, employers who want to attract and keep the best will start to consider the employee's level of satisfaction and personal values more than simply the material benefits and rewards that they offer.

Noticeably, although keeping job security as a foremost concern is just plain common sense, no two employees or group of employees are the same and each has their own personal requirements. Post-70s and post-80s are seeking work-life balance whereas the post-90s, who are just now starting to populate the workplace, clearly put themselves first in their decision making process. HR departments are faced with the dilemma of having to take different viewpoints when considering and solving the problems that arise as a result of the fundamental differences in these different groups of job seekers and employees.

To achieve the above, Zhaopin.com looks forward to learning more from the experience of China's leading employers and recognizing the top performers through the China Best Employer Award campaign. Zhaopin.com, by making the best practices of the winning companies known through this gala award event in the human resource sector, hopes to assist more companies in closing the gap, establishing the best HR practices and creating excellent employer brands. As the industry leader, Zhaopin.com has the ability and obligation to introduce awards programs beneficial to the industry and to China's overall economy and to make them part of the country's DNA. The success of the China Best Employer Award campaign is a strong demonstration that the sector headed in the right direction.

SOURCE Zhaopin.com