Do you constantly have help wanted ads out and waste hours every week interviewing inappropriate candidates? Are your expansion plans being put on hold because you don’t have enough qualified managers or sales professionals?

Yeah, it’s a China problem. Not enough people with skills, and when you train them they take off for double the salary you were willing to pay. Everyone wants a fortune, regardless of their professional experience or job performance. And you need more and more bodies just to handle customer inquiries and existing business.

It’s HR with Chinese characteristics.

Here are a few ideas that have made dumber managers than you look positively brilliant. You?re welcome.

Cross-train

Got someone on your team that you can work with? Start training them in other jobs and functions. Look at what I just wrote. I didn’t say - ‘throw your sole competent employees into a series of never-ending fire-fighting tasks.’ That’s what you are actually doing. I said, ‘TRAIN them to actually take on new functions’. They like that better than being your fire extinguisher.

Over hire

You’ve got a sales team of 10, and you are adding a new representative. Well, we know that of the 10 you have, 1 or 2 (or 5) are going to give notice this year. So consider keeping the ads running until you have 2 or 3 acceptable candidates. It doesn’t cost much more to train several people at once.

MD programs

Management Development. You have a plan for your smart young managers. You know you want to promote them and let them take on more responsibility. Have you told them yet? Give it a try and see what happens. Panel says — ‘Improved Performance’. Crazy, I know. But when you tell young managers you are planning for their future, they start planning as well.

Promote & specialize

Same idea as MD, but on a smaller scale. Just remember — western managers wait to see performance, then they give the raise and the promotion. Chinese staffers want to see the raise and promotion — then they’ll deliver the performance. It’s up to you to figure this one out.

Retention programs (ie: MBA, pay for school, etc)

The oldest trick in the book. Pick up the tuition bill for MBA, training programs, language school, etc in return for an agreement to stay with your company for a specific period of time. Has been working since Arp sent Gop to that wheel-making workshop in return for 2 years of labor and a mammoth tusk. Good as part of the management development program we talked about. Tends to be pricey — and the moment you pick up the tab for one staffer the swarm will begin.

Re-examine other options.

Local locals — getting better.
Experienced ex-pats — getting cheaper
Outsourcers — a little pricey, but once they’re set up they’ll free you to perform high-level management functions — like getting your other outsourcers to finish their work.

Time it right.

The market gets much tighter after the Oct 1 National Day holiday, as people start digging in for annual bonus in February. Move soon, or make plans to work with your existing resources until March.

Will this end your HR dilemma in China? No, but it may help a little. At the end of the day, you’ll live or die by 2 simple rules:

Success in China is a function of how well you manage your human assets.
In the absence of good experience, managers must learn to train effectively.

Good luck out there.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 3:21 pm and is filed under HR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.