European head hunters move in
(XING BAO)
02/28/2003
Many multinationals in Shanghai are expanding rapidly and are sometimes desperate to fill their ranks but remain unhappy with the current local recruitment system, according to the head of a major European executive search firm moving its brand into Shanghai."I visit multinationals here and find out they really need a different kind of recruitment service now," said Thomas GrosJean, president of MPS-Enterprises Ltd, one of the top-five executive recruitment firms in Europe. GrosJean said he knew of multinationals in Shanghai that face issues such as the sudden need for 15 more middle-management staff. But they were having difficulty coping with a recruitment industry in Shanghai that focused primarily on "CV matching", which he saw as a simplistic process that was not giving them effective results. "When a company wants to fill a position, it is not a matter of evaluating a list of candidates," he said. "You need to start by evaluating the company." MPS is part of a contingent of top-level executive search firms that have zeroed in on China as revenues for the industry are diving in the US and Europe. Both Heidrick & Struggles and Korn Ferry have lately announced their intention to set up offices in China to tap the market for executive recruitment. Like the others, MPS is not going it alone. The government allows foreign recruitment firms to operate in China only when partnering with local recruitment firms. MPS will work as a division within a Shanghai company, Weiyi Human Resource Development, but GrosJean said it will push the MPS brand name. After several weeks in Shanghai working with the local staff, GrosJean said he is awed by the size of the market. "The prospects are so big that we are going to have a problem to keep up with the demand from customers," he said. He predicted that over the next half dozen years billings by executive recruitment firms may well reach US$100 million annually, with MPS taking a "significant share" of that total. "It's not a dramatic size, but we have to develop the market." MPS enters a field in China that already has an estimated 4,000 recruitment firms, but GrosJean saw his company in a different league, catering at first to multinationals while educating Chinese companies that will need more sophisticated human resources strategies to be internationally competitive. GrosJean said multinationals now operating in Shanghai might also be operating in 50 other countries, and so needed a broad scope of human resources services. "We are not in the business of moving a lot of bodies at the same time at a low cost," he said. He said international headhunters such as MPS were employing a much stricter methodology for finding candidates. For example, he said MPS could look at testing a company president and the line manager to compare their expectations for a new candidate. MPS is expecting to localize its international practice. "We want to operate at the local level," said Chong Kim Weng, Executive Director of Weiye and regional head of MPS in Asia.
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