Hong Kong Association of Graduate Recruiters (HKAGR) 2012 Conference
Dan and I attended the 2nd Annual HKAGR conference, held in Hong Kong on the 24th of August 2012. We attended the first conference last year in April and it was one of the reasons that we ended up launching www.gradconnection.hk a site dedicated to the Hong Kong graduate recruitment market.
The conference was attended by around 50 delegates with a mix of employers from a wide range of industries predominantly finance and law related. This year there was a strong Aussie contingent with Ben Reeves from the AAGE, Emma from SA Water and Josh from DBL attending as well as a number of the attendees being Australian expats.
The presentations throughout the day were delivered by quite a wide range of presenters and covered a lot of ground in regards to the various phases of the graduate recruitment process and a lot of the market research specific to the Hong Kong market.
Presentation Sessions
GradConnection: This year we covered a wide range of topics, from Mobile website optimisation for careers sites, trends in mobile development and handsets, how to source students back to Asia from the US using Google Adwords and how the use of Internet Memes is becoming something recruiters are going to need to know now and even more in the future. If you’re interested in getting a copy of our presentation, send me an email at [email protected].
GraduAce – assessment centres in asia – Peter Finch the managing director of Graduace Graduace specialises in running assessment centres throughout Asia and works with major recruiters in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Peter shared some insights he has learned from building assessment matrices for his clients which include HKTDC, Nokia and PwC. One of the key learnings from his presentation was to create a competency mapping to ID core competencies to all of your assessment centre activities to ensure total coverage with validation of findings from one assessment to another.
HKAGR employer survey and panel – Presented by Neil Chowings from Work Group– this presentation provided some good insights into what employers in the HK region are thinking and will help forecast recruitment activity into the next year. It was interesting to note that recruiters in Hong Kong were recruiting across a very wide geographical area, specifically Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Japan, Australia, India, SEA, Korea, Taiwan and the UK. The Majority of employers were also open to hiring graduates form out of the region to begin their careers somewhere in Asia. One of the key trends to note is that the hiring numbers across APAC were staying consistent to last year.
Alexander Mann Solutions – how to recruit in China – Presented by Martin Cerullo Managing Director APAC at AMS Martin and his team at AMS are extremely active across Asia and were sharing knowledge on some of their learnings from the Chinese market specifically. Some of the more interesting points were that out of all of the Chinese students studying at overseas universities, 63% of them would like to relocate back to China after graduating making this a great talent pipeline to recruit if you are able to reach them to pull them back to your organisation in China. Another interesting dimension was the esteem that grads hold government employers, state owned enterprises and private enterprise in terms of attractiveness with the figures being a lot more skewed towards public service and SOE compared to other countries where government jobs can be unattractive to students.
All in all it was a very informative day and if you have a focus on Hong Kong let alone the Asia region you will be able to take a lot out of the day by attending, find out more at www.hkagr.com full members are able to download most of the conference presentation files as well so get in touch with the committee to join.
