Recruiting overseas needs knack for diversity

Chinese enterprises need to think globally about their mergers and acquisitions - and not only about the market but about talent, says Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Baidu Inc, at the 3rd Conference on China Outbound Forum in Sanya, Hainan province.

Hiring talent is always a tough but unavoidable issue for all overseas investors. Bosses have to consider whether talented people from abroad are willing to move to another country, especially when they are not familiar with the language and local culture.

Zhang shared his experience recruiting globally for Baidu, the world largest Chinese search engine.

"We definitely want people to choose to live in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen because it's convenient to work together," Zhang says. "But there are reasons that hold them back" - for example, a family is settled in one place and may be reluctant to move.

Baidu finds there is a strong demand to set up labs and recruit teams globally. It set up a research and development center for artificial intelligence and unmanned ground vehicles in Silicon Valley, in California, because many kinds of talent the company needs are concentrated there.

"Among those we can attract, half of them may be Chinese who work for Google, Microsoft or Amazon," Zhang says. "But half may be Americans."

Huawei Technologies, with more than 70,000 employees of different nationalities, has a model for recruiting talent abroad. It has established joint research programs with more than 150 universities around the world, hiring local experts and researchers for Huawei's global expansion.

"There is no boundary for innovation," says David Harmon, vice-president for global public affairs at Huawei. "So we focus a lot on cooperation in different markets to attract the best talent."

Different from the domestic market, in which most everyone shares a language and cultural background, overseas M&As face communication challenges in a multicultural context.

Yu Weiping, vice-president of CRRC Corp, used one of Wanda Group's acquisitions as a case in point.

When Wanda acquired AMC Entertainment, the parent company hired people who had studied or worked in China to reform the management team and run the business in the US. Those people, who were familiar with Chinese culture and understood the American business model, successfully transformed AMC from losing to gaining.

"Chinese international students brought in the business ideas and management models of those multinational enterprises," says Liu Ke, dean of the Institute of Clean Energy at South University of Science and Technology of China. "But in the next 30 years, another mission for them is to bring our company to the world."

(China Daily European Weekly 12/16/2016 page25)