Interview with Doron Vermaat of NewChinaCareer

Written by Tangos on August 16, 2007
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NewChinaCareerNewChinaCareer.com is an English-only online recruitment site which mainly targeted at Mainland China, Hongkong, Taiwan and Singapore market. We recently interviewed Doron Vermaat, Managing Director of NewChinaCareer, he shared his ideas on development of NewChinaCareer and the trends on online recruitment market in China.

1. Newchinacareer.com is an English-only online recruitment service targeted Chinese market, why you will be interested in launching such kind of service?

By using English as a platform medium, I am positive that NewChinaCareer.com will appeal to a particular type of sought-after professional in Greater China. For both jobseekers and recruiters, as far as I’m concerned, there is now no other alternative.

There are a variety of job boards out there, but normally the English they use is just for the site’s menus. When you get down to the details of the listing, it can often be very disappointing for users who don’t read Chinese. We offer an easy, one-stop shop for China’s top jobs and China’s top professionals.

We did a lot of research in China and it seems that the top-end multinationals are all desperated for highly-educated people. One of the things that helps us, is that because we are an English-language site, we have a built-in selection filter. You can’t post or apply on the site if you can’t read or write English.

For years, more and more expatriates, highly-educated locals and returning students have been seeking top positions in Chinese companies. By using English, the site is in the exclusive position of being able to narrow down a particular type of candidate and vacancy.

2. Since Newchinacareer.com serves a quite niche market, how do you plan to promote your service to your targeted users?

Next to the common online marketing methods like SEM and banner advertising we are busy to set up several partnerships with large expat portals and other English language China related portals. For these partners we develop white label job boards based on an affiliate model. For an example you can have a look at enterSingapore.info. This way our advertisers can reach out to thousands of extra (passive) job seekers in China.

3. Foreign strategic investors has acquired stakes in ChinaHR.com and Zhaopin.com , do you expect that these competitors will launch similar service in foreseeable future, at the same time, you need to compete with online recruitment service providers in Hongkong as well, how do you plan to compete with them?

Hiring is through the roof in Asia, particularly in China. Companies like Monster Inc that acquired a 40 percent stake in ChinaHR a while ago all want a piece from that pie. There focus until now has been purely on the billons of Chinese job seekers and hiring companies. I’m not expecting any of them to step into the small niche part of the Chinese job-market we are in. When a competitor steps up I expect it to be a Chinese copy cat and not a huge foreign strategic investor. See also this article on APHH.

Regarding Hong Kong where most job boards are English we separate ourselves from competitors by the executive level of our job database. Low salary’s between 40000 and 10.000 HKD are not unusual here in Hong Kong. These are all positions like clerk, merchandiser, assistant etc. Job boards like JobsDB.com and Recruit.com.hk are overloaded with this kind of low salary jobs postings. NewChinaCareer.com offers mostly career opportunities between 20.000 and 80.000 HKD a month.

4. What’s the value you can provide to persuade those recruiters to place recruitment ads on your site?

One of the problems most recruiters are facing nowadays is the extraordinarily large volume of responses. By using English, NewChinaCareer.com is in the exclusive position of being able to narrow down a particular type of candidate.

5. Online recruitment industry are changing in recent years, more job search engine emerge, social networking sites started to provide recruitment service, what’s your opinion on all these “web 2.0″ element in recruitment industry? Why you still launch Newchinacareer.com as a traditional web 1.0 job board?

So far the most successful job boards in terms of revenue are still the traditional web1.0 job boards like Monster.com, Careerbuilder and for Greater China ChinaHR and Zhaopin.com.

From a user’s perspective I do believe in vertical job search engines like indeed.com or social networking sites like LinkedIN, but as an entrepreneur I prefer to make some money. Something that still seems to be a huge problem for web2.0 startups that are based on the Freemium business model.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t follow all current trends very closely. There is big chance that you will find some web2.0 elements such as tags or open profiles in the near future. The basis of NewChinaCareer.com actually is a vertical job search engine, when we launched the site in January this year we were offering somewhere 10.000 jobs that were mostly crawled / aggregated from large company websites

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4 Responses to “Interview with Doron Vermaat of NewChinaCareer”

  1. chan chi sang on August 18th, 2007 10:56 am

    This model does not make sense. They say their advantage is that their site is English only but that is actually such a big disadvantage for the China market!

    Building a English only job site for China is rather like building a Japanese only job site for the USA. By restricting your site to English you can at most reach 0.5% of that market.

    Does it sound smart to you?

    Actually on Zhaopin or ChinaHR you can ALSO post a job in ENGLISH only if you want and then you will only get replies from candidates that can read English, but I think the advantage of this is really irrelevant…

  2. zcc on August 18th, 2007 11:30 pm

    This post is so long and my eyes are poor now.

  3. Will Zhao on August 19th, 2007 1:51 pm

    I think trying to attack the market of all Chinese speaking candidates is basically impossible at this point. Cutting down that into a reasonable niche I think is pretty intelligent from them.

  4. yamour on August 19th, 2007 2:01 pm

    there more than 180.000 expats working in China. Most of them not able to read Chinese. I think its a good idea to focus on this nice instead of competing with big guys like 51jobs or zhaopin.

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