Baidu, the largest Chinese Internet search engine, plans to recruit at least 30 engineers from the Silicon Valley at a job fair in the United States on July 10, the first step of their global recruitment plan.

All the positions, including R&D engineers, software architects, technical architects, database administration and management engineers, and business analysts, are based in China.

Zheng Bin, director of Baidu's human resources department, said the company is expecting as many talents as possible, and the job fair is only a beginning of their global recruitment.

"Silicon Valley has gathered the most high-tech talents, which meet our requirement of building Baidu into a world-class Internet enterprise," Zheng told China Daily on Thursday.

Baidu's president Li Yanhong used to work in the Silicon Valley before he returned to China and created the company in 2000. Around 10,000 people are working for Baidu at the moment, with no more than 10 foreign passport employees.

Three basic qualifications for all positions are enthusiasm, hard work and comprehensive capabilities, including communicating, cooperating and organizing abilities, Zheng said.

"We welcome talents from different backgrounds, but people who speak Chinese are preferred since they are going to work in China," he said.

Baidu was named one of the "top 100 Chinese employers" in 2009 by the World Economist Group.

"Our employees get competitive salaries, comparable with other leading IT companies, such as Microsoft and IBM," Zheng said.

Li Youlin, a senior software engineer who has worked in Silicon Valley for more than 10 years, told China Daily that Chinese companies are very attractive for IT talents there.

"Many software engineers are interested in China because of the rapid economic growth," he said.

The basic salary in Chinese companies might not be as high as in other leading companies, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, but they are good at offering other benefits, for instance stock shares and big bonuses, he said.

"I think Baidu will be popular at the job fair, but some American software engineers do not quite accept their self-censorship," he added.

According to Iresearch, a company specializing in studies of customer behavior in new economic fields, Baidu's operating income took almost 68 percent of the search engine business in China during the first three month this year, which was about 4 percent more than the previous quarter.

The company also shared more than three quarters online search requests, while its only rival google.com only operated less than 20 percent in the same period.

Baidu is the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index back in December 2007, and their stock price just broke US$700 per share this April.

Tang Jun, former president of Microsoft China, said the Chinese IT industry needs more talents with international background.

"We have plenty of native IT elites, but they lack leadership capabilities and a creative mind," said Tang, the current president of the New Huadu Industrial Group.

"But in order to become a China-based world-class company, Baidu also needs local staff with work experience at domestic enterprises."

(China Daily July 2, 2010)