Personal Data Name: Frank Mulligan Country of Origin: Ireland Location: Shanghai Time in China: Shanghai & Beijing 11 years		"Don’t hire someone who has 100% of the skills and abilities you want, because that’s one of the reasons for changing jobs – to learn new skills. Hire someone with 70 – 80% of what he’ll need to do the job."
Talent Software -- RPO Position: CEO Industry: HR / Consulting Website: www.talent-software.com
Talent Software is the only provider of fully bilingual Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) hiring technology in China. Our business model is simple. We build you a hiring infrastructure and a hiring process, then we operate it for you. As specialists we do hiring well, and we are getting better day by day. The partnership allows us to further develop the quality of your hiring while you get on with your core business. The process is run through our flagship product, Talent, which is a fully featured, bi-lingual English/Chinese Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

European people are sequential whereas Chinese tend to be synchronous.
The most sequential people are Germans and Americans. You do ‘A’, do it well, finish, go to ‘B’. In China people tend to start many different things at once and they finish when they finish. Deadlines and completion times are less clear. Timing is less clear. Newcomers to China can find this very frustrating, because they really don’t understand why things don’t seem to get done. The reason is that a person starts something, but then someone else calls him and he switches to working on a new project that he considers to be a higher priority. You have to get used to that. You have to teach your staff the way you expect them to work. You should be willing to be flexible, but if this is the only way you work then you have to get your staff to follow your methods. And if you don’t have staff, you have to get used to the environment.

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Getting people’s attention.
Everyone is so busy. HR can’t get the attention of the Recruiter. Recruiters can’t get the attention of the Candidates, because they have so many other offers. People are changing jobs all the time. You call looking for someone, and he’s already left. Or he’s about to leave. It’s very dynamic. It’s hard to get anyone’s attention. The speed of the market is very fast, so you have to react quickly. You have to learn to respond much faster here than in other places.

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Local competition is much more significant than newcomers think.
People will join your company simply to learn your processes and technology. You can find yourself with a problem down the line – not in terms of IP theft, necessarily, but in terms of helping to develop your own competitors. They have a better understanding of the local market and local tastes – but they lack the technical skills and they will use you to learn them. Many internet companies have run into this problem. Taobao, Baidu and other local players – they just understand the local mentality and the feel of what a site should look like and how service should be delivered. You have to adapt everything for the local market. It sounds obvious – but you can’t make assumptions. You have to give people what they like – whether or not you find it appealing.

Identified where high-level management processes and technology would be effective.
I shifted from Headhunting to RPO, because behind the posh search-brands there was actually very little there in terms of technology or process. I identified the problem and developed a solution for it-- by putting necessary technology and process in place. That’s in a sense what we (ex pats) are here for. A lot of the old SOEs just don’t have the abilities to add that kind of value. We’re here to provide the high level management. You have to identify where you can add it, or you’ll be done for. If you try to try to replicate what the local companies do, they will clobber you on price. You have to keep analyzing the environment and stay ahead of the curve. I got involved in blogs over a year ago. Now I think that video is going to be huge. You need to stay ahead all the time.

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I didn’t hire people from competitors.
I hired (new) people and I trained them up. At the beginning I had to do a lot of the work myself. But it meant that I had a team that didn’t leave. They gradually got better. And eventually I got things working the way I want them to. I didn’t hire experienced people. I hired people for their flexibility and their ability to learn. You can go for someone with 4 years instead of 7 years. Don’t hire someone who has 100% of the skills and abilities you want, because that’s one of the reasons for changing jobs – to learn new skills. Hire someone with 70 – 80% of what he’ll need to do the job, because learning new things and acquiring new skills is what will hold him and engage him. As soon as they’ve mastered 100% of a job, you‘ve got to move him up or he’ll leave. That was a big issue in holding my team together for 4 years, which is phenomenal in China.

Manage your cash flow so you can survive the growth curve.
Focus first on making sure that you survive – that’s your first objective. Growth can threaten your business, because your expenses can rise faster than your income. Unless you have a VC behind you, you can’t take huge risks. It’s volatile market. Sometimes people don’t pay, or it takes a long time for new clients to pay you. You must take calculated risks. Cashflow problems can kill you. At the beginning, you have to focus on the cash and watch the pace of your growth.