Young leaders flock to domestic companies

Multinationals are continuing to lose out to local companies when it comes to securing high-quality professionals in China, especially amid domestic tech firms' surging success, according to the 2018 China Leadership Report.

"Local Chinese companies are redefining our entire thinking of the talent market as they continue to attract leaders due to their experience, salary, training and opportunities, which go hand-in-hand with their fast-growing operations and opportunities," said James Root, a partner at global consultancy Bain and Co, and co-author of the report.

In the past five years, roughly 40 percent of business leaders, at director level or above, who began a job at a local company moved there from a foreign enterprise, according to the report conducted by Bain and professional networking site LinkedIn China.

That figure had risen notably from a 2016 survey, when less than one-third of the leaders had moved in the same direction.

The widened gap is due to the growth of the Chinese economy and the fact that employees of all levels are looking for a greater say in leadership decisions, according to the report.

Bain analyzed 66,000 business leaders in LinkedIn China's proprietary member database. The sample set came from 350 major corporations across 18 industries, from manufacturing to modern services.

The survey found that this talent flow is even more pronounced among those under 35 years old. This subverted the long-held view that fresh Chinese graduates and young local professionals seek out formal development opportunities at multinational corporations, where they gain cross-functional and international experience.

Chinese nationals like to be involved in businesses' decision-making processes, prefer a faster working pace, and want more opportunities to explore international markets, all of which are becoming more achievable in local companies, said the head of human resources for a multinational healthcare company, who declined to be named.

"In multinational companies, Chinese business leaders usually take very operational roles" as opposed to real leadership positions, the report cited a regional HR head at a global engineering firm with operations in China as saying. They added that Chinese leaders want to contribute their ideas but can feel constrained by global, top-down decision-making.

Meanwhile, China's emerging tech houses, from taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing to TikTok operator ByteDance, have become the latest magnets drawing the attention of talented professionals.

The report found that one-third of business leaders are below the age of 35, as opposed to just 20 percent in the overall sample.

They are also more likely to be graduates from C9, a bloc of nine reputed Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.

By choosing to work at a Chinese company, leaders can expect to have a more hands-on role in key decision-making and corporate strategy - an opportunity that is very appealing to many business leaders, especially younger employees, who are still building their experience, said Lin Hua, general manager of LinkedIn Talent Solutions at LinkedIn China.

But George Huang, chief human resources officer at SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, cautioned business leaders from multinationals to stay humble and "think clearly about how to bring value to local companies".