How to grow a tech team in China?

There are usually several channels to source candidates — which are quite similar to how we do it in the US.

1. Internal referral — Almost the same as in the US — This channel almost always brings very high quality candidates. I would say this is the best quality channel among others.
2. Job websites. As of 2021 zhipin.com is the most common place to publish jd and collect resumes. There are some other websites like 51job or liepin. But Linkedin is not doing a competent job in the China market.
3. High end third party recruiters or career consultants. Expensive. This is an OK option but usually needs some time — I would say newcomers need at least 6 months to collect several good sources. Also this channel usually works better for high level recruitment than junior/intermediate level recruitment.
4. University BBS. Worth to try but don’t devote too much time on it.
5. Local job fair market. Not really applicable for tech companies.
6. Recruiting for new grads directly from universities is another topic. Having someone from top Universities to join your startup team is usually very difficult.
7. Cooperating with labs or professors in the university is another topic. Also not applicable for most small/medium size companies.

There are many extra difficulties for a startup team to grow its tech team in China than in the US.

1. Majority of people in the tech industry have very little interest in joining startups.
2. New grads from first tier cities will ask for Hukou — and startup companies usually have no way to obtain that.
3. Most of the candidates prefer a high cash salary to the non-liquitable equity part (ISO/ESOP and even RSU for pre-IPO companies). So it’s very difficult for a startup company to compete for compensation with big tech companies in China (Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance, Baidu etc.)
4. Some people prefer state-owned enterprises. Even their TC is usually lower (30%-60% down) than you offered. They prefer SOEs because they think SOEs give better work-life balance and a more stable career (partially true). SOEs can provide Hukou too. It’s like they choose to work as California public servants rather than enter Google. Back in the days when I graduated from Peking University, close to half of the graduating students in my class chose SOEs. I don’t think that many graduating students from Computer Science major enter SOEs-like orgs in the US.
5. Some people prefer western companies or Japan/S Korea/Singapore companies. Overall you will see many reasons a candidate will reject your offer. Most of them won’t tell you the true reason why they don’t accept your offer. So the whole procedure as well as the final negotiation needs a lot of deep understanding and skills.

My 1-year transcript and how.

1. Tech team grew from roughly 10 full time employees to 40 today. No one has quit so far. More than ⅔ of the people we hire this year are veteran level software engineers (corresponding to senior ~ staff level in SF bay area). Part of the rest are return offers for interns.
2. I personally spent a lot of my time and energy on reorganizing the hiring process, then searching, interviewing and recruiting candidates. Definitely more than ⅓ of my time because I think recruiting is a very important part for an early stage startup.
3. We also hired some remote part-time engineers as well as interns. They also did an amazing job after all.
4. There were some thoughts I had concluded and tried to write down. But I also feel it’s hard and maybe even wrong to operate in reality based on textualized points. Generally speaking a reliable channel and reasonable strategy is necessary.