Walton: What Is The Impact Of The Financial Crisis On Personnel Management Strategy?

Peng Aimei, one of the "four big accounting firms" who left Shanghai last year, went to the United States to pursue further studies in Shanghai. He is considering what kind of company employment he should choose after graduation next year.

Not long ago, foreign companies were her number one choice because they could provide higher salaries and more career opportunities than Chinese state-owned enterprises.

But at the end of 2008, when he witnessed the unrelenting disengagement of colleagues in accounting firms, Peng said that his view of state-owned enterprises has indeed changed.

Peng's psychological change is not a special case.

According to the ranking of the eighth "best employers of 2010 Chinese University" released in August by Chinahr.com, an online recruitment website, the number of local enterprises in China is overwhelmingly dominant in the most ambitious enterprises.

According to a survey of about 200 thousand university students from 200 universities in China, 46 of the 50 most popular employers were local businesses, and last year, the figure was 29.

Of the 46, 33 are large state-owned enterprises, such as China Mobile, Bank of China and State Grid.

The change in the concept of job hunting is only the result of China's human resources executives.

It may be a new creed to win less.

When the low wage level of Chinese manual workers has become the focus of public opinion since the beginning of this year, the pressure of the rising wages of white-collar workers in China has forced human resources executives to find new and innovative ways to attract and retain talents.

Personnel crisis after the financial crisis

In addition to budgetary pressure, it is also necessary to make a quick change in personnel strategy because of the strong rebound in China's white-collar recruitment market.

In the first half of this year, when the rest of the world's economy has not yet recovered from the crisis, 51job, the largest recruitment website in China, has a total revenue of online recruitment advertising of about $16 million (110 million yuan) in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 61% over the same period last year, while its second quarter revenue reached 19 million 900 thousand dollars (135 million yuan), up 74% over the same period last year.

Both pay level and employee turnover rate rebounded.

According to the 2009-2010 comprehensive pay and measurement report recently published by Hewitt Associates, the global HR consulting and outsourcing company, China's pay level has increased by 8.4% this year, compared with 4.5% last year, compared with 10.3% in 2008.

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In the 11 Asian Pacific markets studied, only India's pay rise is comparable to that of China.

At the same time, the remuneration of top managers in mainland China has been very close to or even equated to the same positions in Hongkong, Singapore and South Korea.

It is predicted that the remuneration level of white-collar workers in mainland China is expected to rise by more than 9% next year, with the highest level of remuneration among middle-level managers.

Moreover, Hewitt also said that the old problems faced by personnel managers are reappearing: the average employee turnover rate in the Chinese market has climbed from 8.3% in 2001 to 16.7% in 2010.

Many Chinese human resource managers say that the high turnover rate this year is related to the huge layoffs of some enterprises in the Chinese market last year.

In particular, some multinational corporations have to implement the radical layoffs on the global scale in order to cope with the dismal performance of their domestic market or a business chain, which makes the reputation of the company affected.

This is exactly what Rong Tao (Craig Rong), director of human resources at East China's Maersk shipping company, is considering.

The global shipping and energy giant Danish Maersk Group suffered its financial deficit for the first time in its 105 year history of operation because of the financial crisis. Its 2009 earnings report showed a net loss of $1 billion and a 20% reduction in the world last year.

At present Maersk Group employs 1500 people in China.

Although the group made a profit of $2 billion 520 million in the first half of this year and provided an optimistic annual profit forecast to the market in August, Rong Tao said that the Chinese region had already begun to feel the problem of increased employee turnover at the beginning of this year.

"Last year was the first loss that the company suffered in a century.

Cutting such a large number of employees and shutting down some overseas operations may contribute to the performance of the company's balance sheet and increase production capacity. However, once the recruitment is resumed, it will damage the image of the company in the minds of job seekers.

At the same time, he pointed out that "we are not the only enterprises affected by this.

Many foreign companies in China which slash jobs last year are also facing similar problems.

Many Chinese state-owned enterprises and private enterprises did not adopt such a radical way of layoffs during the financial crisis for various reasons. "

However, if we look at the positive side, Rong Tao also said that the financial crisis is a timely reminder that companies should make positive adjustments.

"This crisis has forced us to take the restructuring of human resources strategy as a priority.

At present, we are actively planning and implementing new measures to shape enterprises into more attractive employers.

"Now, in order to implement the new strategy of personnel management, we already have the appropriate system, measures and means.

The company will also introduce very detailed implementation plans at all levels.

These include the establishment of a new performance based pay system and the gradual increase of variable remuneration to a certain proportion.

At the same time, he said he has devoted much effort to communicating with employees, and is investigating a new project on employee value proposition, in order to attract outside talents and retain internal staff to a greater extent.