HR Issues; Hiring Guidelines a.k.a. smash the iron rice bowl; enter the teacup and newspaper

OK, so now you are finally set up and ready to get down to some real business. But first you need some local staff. Based on our powers of predicting the future, here's a description of the first person you will hire:

First Staff Member Of Your New China Office

• 20-30 yrs of age, male
• Single
• College graduate, possibly business degree or MBA
• Good English skills; possibly a slight British accent
• Has read English literature extensively. Also read that book about Iacocca three times.
• Well dressed; business suit, shiny wingtips. Has actually removed the label from the sleeve of their suit.
• Parents are well connected, possibly big shots in the government.
• Good connections with high school and college classmates that come from a similar background.
• Possible experience with another foreign company in China. Or possibly from one of the shining star organizations in China like CITIC.
• Has done previous consulting work on "China Market Strategy" for a big name western company.

And here is the type of performance you will get from this candidate after you hire him:

6 Month Performance Review Of First Staff Member Of Your New China Office

• Arrives late in the morning and leaves early in the evening
• Constantly hanging around the office studying English or practicing English with one of the westerners around. Speaks English in that annoying high-pitched nasal sound like that announcer on the English news TV show in China.
• Overly concerned with his business clothing. Spends five minutes hanging up his suit coat each morning.
• Very proud of his karaoke singing voice which sounds surprising like the Taiwanese singer Fei Yu Qing.
• Refers to any sort of alcoholic beverage as "wine" whether it was made with grapes or not. (This is not a very important employee characteristic,but this always has bugged us so we thought we would mention it here).
• Parents pay all his expenses so he really is not motivated to make much more money. Sure he would like to make more money for the same work load, but if offered the chance to make more money for harder work and longer hours, he will invariably say no.
• Fiddles with the computer for one hour for every five minutes he is actually using it.
• Spends major portion of each day drinking tea from a porcelain tea cup with a lid and refilling it once each hour. Reads the newspaper all morning after he arrives late.
• Spends lots of company money entertaining his guanxi contacts on your expense account. No business ever follows any of this entertaining. But that is not his fault. It is because your product sucks, and it is too expensive, and "you do not understand the situation in China."
• If the budget for traveling is XXXX RMB per day, he will submit detailed receipts at the end of each trip totally up to the exact maximum limit amount.
• He spends at least one full day preparing this expense reimbursement report.
• If you ever travel with him on the road, you will notice he never asks for receipts. So where the hell does he get the receipts for his expense reports? He gets a whole stack of blank receipts every so often when he is traveling alone. Think of the time and money he saves you by doing this!
• Don't worry about this travel expense scam too much since he hates to travel and will do anything to avoid it.

Don't worry about this lousy employee since he will quit after 6 months and move to another western company that will offer him 10% more than you paid. These "highly qualified candidates" are in short supply in China so they change jobs on average every nine months (no kidding, we got this actual figure from one of the professional headhunters in Hong Kong).

What Will You Do Next?

Return to the top of the above section and repeat this cycle indefinitely for around 4.5 years. After you have done this, continue reading below.

First Staff Member Of Your New China Office After You Have 4.5 Years Experience

Here is a description of the type of candidate you will hire after repeating the above cycle for 4.5 years:

• 30-45 years of age, male or female
• Married, with one child.
• Possible high school graduate
• No English skills except "very good", "no good", and "OK"
• Badly dressed; rumpled business clothes, dirty "dress" shoes with overly high heels, three layers of hand-knitted sweaters, woolen longjohns of a bright color peaking out of the bottoms of his or her trouser cuffs. And of course, if a male, still has the label on the sleeve of his suit coat.
• Parents are farmers or manual laborers or grade school teachers in a township or village.
• Good connections with the guards outside your building and with low level people at the post office and customs offices.
• Experience with a Chinese state owned company in the heavy industry field.
• Doesn't know what consulting is and when told about it, is a little suspicious about it.

And here is the type of performance you will get from this candidate after you hire him or her:

6 Month Performance Review Of First Staff Member Of Your Existing China Office After You Have 4.5 Years Experience

• Arrives early in the morning and never seems to leave
• On the telephone all morning yelling through bad connections to people in the countryside who speak bad Mandarin. Disappears in the afternoon but reappears in the early evening.
• Says they are "too stupid" to learn English.
• Looks like they sleep in their business clothing. Seem to wear the same outfit for months at a time.
• Sang old Mao-era revolutionary songs at karaoke places even before this became fashionable.
• Drinks tea from a jar with a twist-on lid.
• Carries a plastic bag everywhere.
• Does not know how to use the computer. Writes all his "memos" by hand with a leaky fountain pen on "borrowed" rice-paper-thin stationary from a lousy hotel in Harbin with the hotel name printed on top of the page in Mao Ze Dong's calligraphy.
• If the budget for traveling is XXX RMB per day, he will stay with friends on the road or sleep in the factory dormitory to save the company money.
• Always prepares expense reimbursement reports late and probably loses half the receipts.
• Travels extensively and is usually gone for days at a time. Works independently to solve problems and usually forgets to tell you about them after they are solved.
• Driven to make money to support his or her family and child. Saving money to buy a 1 bedroom apartment. Responds very well to performance incentives and rarely misses achieving them.
• Most importantly, does lots of good business for your company, negotiates contracts, ships goods, and generally makes big profits month after month.

So why won't you hire this person in the first year? We don't know. We didn't hire them then either until year 4.5 so we assume you will make the same mistake also.

A Few Other China HR Tidbits Off The Top Of Our Heads

• Chinese people hate to take directions from other Chinese people.
• Chinese people hate to take directions from Taiwanese or Hong Kong people.
• Taiwan and HK Chinese go crazy living in China and insult every mainland Chinese person they come within 5 feet of.
• Hong Kong Chinese speak laughably bad Mandarin and know very little about mainland Chinese culture no matter what they tell you. Basically their claim to fame in China is being willing to pay big bribes to everyone they come in contact with.
• Chinese staff will steal small personal items from each other so they all need somewhere safe to lock up their valuables in your office.
• Chinese people will hate you for the rest of your life if you fire them without treating them nicely. Even worse, they will spend the rest of their lives taking revenge on you. So make sure you break down and cry whenever you have to fire some local staff. Do this even if they have been embezzling from your company or they have murdered another staff member over an argument about who should refill the hot water dispenser. No matter how bad their offense, pretend to be very upset that you have no other choice but to let them go.
• Chinese people always like to hire their relatives. But you will not like this, and they will figure this out after a while. Then they will make sure not to tell you an employment candidate is their relative until after you have hired them.
• When in groups, Chinese men love to drink bai jiu liquor, sit around in their underwear, and play cards. Make sure they do not do this on company time or on company premises. Well, at least not on company premises. OK, there really is no way you can stop them from doing this. At least make sure nobody sees them.
• Chinese people hate all other Chinese people and will always try to harm other Chinese if it does not cause themselves much trouble. This is sometimes called "red eye disease" if the target person actually is better off financially then the attacker. But they will exhibit this same behavior even if the target is not better off financially. It is an automatic, inbred survival mechanism in all mainland Chinese people.
• 58 year old, near retirement age managers from headquarters in Ohio are not good expat management candidates for your top position in China. Usually these guys are named Bob. Sure they will jump at the chance to go to China and bring along the "little woman." They will make some feeble attempts to learn Chinese and how to use chopsticks. And their staff will like their simpleminded and passive outsider approach to business in China. But after two years is up, and Bob and the little woman return to Ohio, headquarters will have very little business to show for all this effort and investment.
• Likewise, don't think that because some French Chinese person has Chinese features that they will be able to do business in China. Many times they do not speak Chinese very well if at all. Oftentimes they speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin. Or their Mandarin has a strong Cantonese French accent. Worst of all, they have a strange contradiction in their gut that tells them to look down with disdain upon Chinese people; this works fine and results in them insulting the Chinese people in China. But they get a strange shock every morning when they look in the mirror and realize that they too are Chinese. This causes them to eventually lose their minds.

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