Shanghai'd

Recruiting (with Chinese characteristics)

I've been doing a lot of zhao pin for work lately. In fact, I'm in Chengdu (Sichuan province) right now recruiting at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. This past weekend/yesterday, I was in Beijing at Tsinghua University (the "MIT" of China) interviewing more candidates.

As always, recruiting is a grueling, but enjoyable process. A colleague described it as "going to battle". I won't go that far, but suffice to say I'll need a serious rest at the end of this week. I'm not used to being "on" all day like you have to be when you have 8 back-to-back-to-back-to... interviews.

A few observations:

- Chinese students are much hungrier for jobs than their American counterparts. Here's a picture of the info session we did to a capacity crowd of 300+ students at Zhejiang University. Keep in mind these are all Masters of Engineering students hoping for a shot at a job with my company. For reference, when I recruit at my alma mater the University of Colorado we're lucky to get 30 students at our info session, and half of them only show up for the free pizza.


- It doesn't take a genius to figure out the major paradigm shift going on in the high tech world. China is simply graduating much more, much hungrier, highly qualified engineering students than the US. Anyone still clutching to that stereotype that Chinese students lack the creativity to compete in the global marketplace isn't paying attention.

- I had the nerve-racking but rewarding opportunity to present - in Chinese - in front of hundreds of people. I think (hope?) they were so blown away to see a foreigner unexpectedly speaking Chinese they didn't notice my horrible grammar and pronunciation.

- It hits home that you're really in China when you see classes like "Principles of Marxist Philosophy" and "A survey of Deng Xiaoping's thoughts" on all the transcripts.