Baidu, Sina Weibo and SNS fight for online job search market in China

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2011 seems to be an uneasy year for many of China’s online recruiting or job search websites. The biggest challenge comes from Baidu, China’s search engine giant, and Sina Weibo, Twitter equivalent in China.

Earlier this week (April, 13th), Baidu launched job search portal Baidu Rencai (百度人才) where job seekers can upload resumes and search for available jobs and employers can put up job postings. The portal itself has nothing different from other online job search websites.

The innovative part is that Baidu incorporated job search function into its regular search

engine result pages (SERP). Now Baidu returns job postings for any search with keywords that sound like a job title. For   example, if you key in “product manager” in Baidu, you will get a list of available jobs from Baidu Rencai stacked into one section on SERP.

SERP for keyword “产品经理” (product manager)

Screenshot of Baidu Rencai homepage

In March, Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging site, also introduced online recruiting service – micro-recruiting is what they call it. (click to see what Twitter should learn from Sina Weibo)

By using tags such as “微简历” (micro-resume) and “微招聘” (micro-recruiting), users need to pitch themselves in 140 words to potential employers. Job seekers are encouraged to be as creative as possible     as to how to make full use the 140 words. In addition to job related credentials, number of followers on Sina Weibo and number of resume retweets are also taken into consideration by employers. The ecosystem   has the potential to turn “social capital” into real capitals.

Sina micro-recruiting

Renren.com, China’s Facebook and biggest SNS, has a built-in recruiting service called Renren Recruiting. Job seekers can upload their resumes to their Renren accounts, search for available positions on Renren Recruiting page and apply to positions directly on Renren. The service itself is similar to millions of other online job search sites. But one powerful function of Renren Recruiting is the “job seeker discussion” function attached to each job posting. Given Renren’s wide reach, job seekers are able to share their interview or working experiences.

Renren Recruiting

A job post on Renren Recruiting with discussion function

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