Recruiting in China is never easy for foreign or domestic companies alike. Though the global recession continues and leads to many pay-cuts, unpaid leaves or layoffs, SMEs still find it hard to have the right candidates for many of their China operation vacancies.

The same as recruiting in any other corner of the world, before the commencement of the recruiting process in China, your company needs to understand the talent market, know what is your position in the market, the requirements of your company, and what additional resources you need.

The first problem with the current China talent market is, although the growth rate of salary levels slowed down, due to stronger risk-aversion resulting from uncertain economic outlook, it is very hard to lure experienced candidates from their current jobs. Another problem is Chinese people put strong value on face, so even if SMEs pay a highly-competitive salary, it is difficult for them to attract.

a high-calibre from a Fortune 500. So practicality pays a lot.

Before spending money on channels of recruiting, you shall have a long-sighted recruitment plan, in which you will have a clear and realistic job description for every post. Then you need to find suitable recruiting channels.

For executive and management level candidates, reference is always one of the best ways. Good people bring along good people. The executive search companies are also good choices. They often have relations and timely tips in certain industries.

There are some very popular Chinese recruitment websites to resort to, the top three of which are 51job.com, zhaopin.com, and chinahr.com. All the three are general sites, and if you want some industry-specific recruitment websites, they are also in large quantities. You could find them by searching on China search engine baidu.com.

Though there are also many newspapers and job fairs dedicated to recruitment, young and educated people tend to prefer Internet for job-searching. But newspapers and job fairs are still good choices to find entry-level candidates or low-level employees such as drivers, chefs and Ayi.

If you need highly-intelligent, critical-thinking and leader-type beginners, you go directly to top-tier China universities. The graduates there are often of much higher quality and are more international-minded.

For the Chinese candidate CV, they customarily lack motivation letters and have few or obscure references. For the interview, because Chinese people are brought up in an environment valuing modesty, they do not like to show off to interviewers, so be careful while scrutinizing them so as not to miss qualified but not expressive candidates.