China Focus: Platforms launched to help Chinese companies recruit talent

BEIJING, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- A number of service platforms and projects were launched Friday in Beijing's tech hub Zhongguancun to help Chinese companies find aspiring young talent from outside the mainland.

These platforms offer vocational training and internship opportunities to college students and graduates from places such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States who increasingly see the Chinese mainland as an ideal place to launch their careers.

"For Taiwan's youth, Chinese mainland, with its huge market and career opportunities, offers a greater testing ground for their new concepts and ideas," said Chen Chang-feng, chairman of a Taiwan-based organization engaged in youth exchanges across the Taiwan Strait.

Over the past five years, Chen's organization has helped more than 400 Taiwan students land internships on the mainland and many of them were later employed by big-name companies.

On Friday, his organization joined with Kr Space, a Beijing-based incubator, to launch an innovation hub and a startup accelerator, to open up more opportunities for the island's youth in mainland's tech and innovation industries.

Taiwan's job market has been quite bleak since the 2008 financial crisis, prompting many of the island's youth to turn to the mainland as their first career choice, Chen said.

"After coming to mainland, many of Taiwan's young professionals were excited to find that what they do can often influence millions of people. This gave them an sense of achievement that they can never achieve on the island," he said.

In recent years, Chinese mainland has taken various measures to create favorable environment for youth from Taiwan to find jobs or start businesses in the mainland, in an effort to increase cooperation and communication across the Strait. In east China's Jiangsu Province alone, about 50 platforms have been set up towards this goal, benefiting nearly 1,000 Taiwan youth.

However, the search for talent goes way beyond the island. On Friday, Kr Space and Amige, a company offering vocational services for overseas Chinese, also set up an education base to facilitate Chinese students returning from the United States to find a job.

The project aims to brush up job-seeking skills of the students and prepare them with knowledge of the domestic job market to ensure a smoother career path.

"In recent years, Chinese graduates of American universities have had a clear vision that China presents the best opportunities for their future careers," Xu Ke, co-founder and CEO of Amige.

Citing a report on employment of overseas Chinese, Xu said about 80 percent of Chinese studying in the United States returned to China to pursue their careers over the past few years and the number is still on the rise.

"The new generation of overseas Chinese talent tends to follow their passion in choosing career paths," Xu said. "In this sense, China's thriving innovation industry has great appeal for them." Enditem

(Ye Yuanhao also contributed to the story)