Recently, I spent the whole month of July in Beijing and Shanghai. During this time, the World AI Conference (WAIC) was held in Shanghai with much fanfare. Securing a ticket to the WAIC event seemed more difficult than getting a Football World Cup ticket. But that’s not what I want to share with you.
I want to share some of my observations and an insights from the past month specifically about the state of the talent market in Mainland China. There are many points of views of the Mainland China job market from being absolutely booming to totally disastrous. And like most global cities, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had significant impact on jobs. Robots are progressively replacing people and AI Agents are replacing jobs. The fact is that all these views have their own merits.
I would break down my observations in a few areas:
- AI & Robotics are changing the way we work and live. The rapid development of AI tools have increasingly meant companies are developing and deploying AI agents to replace labor intensive and lower value tasks. This is especially true for those larger companies that have the financial, technical and talent resources to execute this. However, there are still many Small and Medium sized Enterprises that don’t have those resources available and therefore may still lag behind in executing AI strategies.
In terms of robots and I’m not talking about robots used in High Tech Manufacturing or self driving vehicles and the likes. I’m talking about robots that many of us see in our daily lives especially living in Mainland China. We see them in hotels, restaurants and convenience outlets. Despite its growing presence, there is still a big gap between human and robot interaction. For example, many hotels are now utilising robots to deliver basic items like bottled water, toiletries and even food deliveries. However, if you ever experience standing next to a robot in the elevator, you will find the robot will take precedence over you as the customer when getting in and out of the elevator. Simple things but robots as of today have not developed the basic service that many of us have come to expect. But I’m sure these issues will be very quickly rectified in future models.
- Talent Supply and Demand – when I spoke with many candidates during this trip, I hear many differing views about the job market and their responses varies based on location, level of seniority and importantly the functional/skill specialisation of the candidates. There is a level of dislocation to this. When I speak with colleagues, clients and candidates, this is what hearing and seeing in different markets:
- Beijing – it’s AI, AI and more AI. Market is very hot and hiring demand is huge. But it seems demand is much greater than supply in terms of good AI candidates. PE/VC activities are still strong but finding suitable talents continues to be a challenge. Hiring decisions can be super quick if the right candidates can be sourced
- Shanghai – Market seemed more subdued in general but some sectors such as Consumer & FMCG is particularly strong but overall hiring process across the more traditional sectors is taking longer as corporates have more choices available
- Hangzhou & Shenzhen – still very much technology driven hiring demand
- Overall Observations of Corporate Hiring activities – I would summarise by saying that general sentiment of the Mainland China talent is improving. Hiring demand has lifted especially in Q3 across most of the sectors however our clients are becoming more selective when making final hiring decisions. We are also seeing more and more Mainland Chinese companies expanding abroad and looking for talents who has the international experience, local market exposure and the language and cultural awareness of HQ management team
For our candidates reading this article, my word of encouragement to you is to continue to learn & adopt more AI skillsets in your work practices and control the things that are controllable which is continuous learning. Stay tune and I’ll have more market updates for you in the coming weeks.
Article written by David Chan, CFR Global Executive Search China
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