A popular bilingual employment Web site in China, Zhaopin, is earning ten times the revenue it earned in one year ago.
Zhaopin averages 30-40,000 pages per day, considered excellent in China’s nascent market, and advertises more than 800 jobs at a time.
“The great thing about Zhaopin is that it is run by an executive search company [Alliance Consulting],” said Steve Chiu, Zhaopin’s advertising manager.”That means we have been able to bring the company’s expertise into the equation.”
Prominent foreign and local companies continue submitting job ads to Zhaopin.
“It is a very good Web site which helps us to post our openings,” said Maureen Wu, human resources executive for Microsoft China.”Through the site, we have filled 4 or 5 positions since November 1997.”
“We have been using Zhaopin for a year,” said Matt Roberts, Dow Jones China’s director of operations and personnel management. “Its been pretty successful.”
“One of the advantages is that the type of person looking at Zhaopin is educated, professional–the type of individual that we are looking for,” continued Roberts.
“Zhaopin is one of the most popular recruitment and job offering sites in China,” said Rudy Chan, CEO of 24/7 Media Asia.
In its early stages, Alliance was running the Zhaopin site on individual HTML pages, posting one job per page.
However, according to Chiu, the process became time consuming so Alliance with the help of a German company designed a database to enable them to post and remove jobs quickly.
“We are so happy with the way that the dbase has turned out that we think it may be good product to sell to corporations as a mini-human resources system.” said Chiu. “The dbase is fully bilingual and is really based around gathering information from the Web.”
Zhaopin is also looking for foreign or local venture capital to help it aggressively expand its sales force and to build an ad campaign to create brand awareness, said Chiu.