I have been giving interviews, around twenty or so, since I came to Shanghai, four weeks ago.  Just to get to this point has been a pretty arduous process.  It is just a never ending process to completely understand something in a country like China.  Day after day I am just amazed (and downright confused) as to why they do things the way they do.  Anyway, I initially went through a difficult time getting people to even respond to my job advertisement.  I remember one of my co-workers, Xiao Liang, telling me months and months ago that he was in charge of the interviewing process for his new company.  He was putting up ads on job web sites and describing to me that it was such a difficult process because he had so many replies that he had to filter out.  There were only so many positions available and so many interview spots that he could handle himself and for each job, he was receiving over thirty or forty resumes, daily.

Now my early situation was a bit different.  Through the help of the company that I am partnering with and JJ, we put up ads on various web sites, with a professional description (in English and Chinese) of the requirements and qualifications I am looking for.  To everyone’s surprise, we were getting almost no response, from all of these sites.  Just nothing.  I expected to have too many people applying, (even more than my co-worker had, in fact, since I am a foreign company), but we were getting nothing.

Eventually we tweaked the ads, made them fit the standard format and patterned them off of other ads that seemed to be working, albeit the initial ones were probably more clear and truthful.  Finally we started to get a few responses.  This was exciting, actual computer software graduates who were interested in my company.  I settled on giving interviews at my partnering company and to be completely honest, I was a bit nervous when I was preparing for the first interviews with these applicants.   I designed a few test questions for them to answer during the interview and I wrote out a rough outline for myself to help me if I got a bit nervous or too casual during the interview.  It was something like this:

1)  Brief introduction
2)  Talk about applicants experience / skills
3)  Give them brief test with very simple programming and creating thinking questions
4)  Discuss the test and some of the answers
5)  Explain what my company does and describe what a typical work day would be like
6)  Answer any questions or respond to any comments from the applicant

This guideline was pretty darn standard, nothing out of the ordinary.  The questions were really simple.  Personally, I always hated when I had to answer these difficult thought process questions or any kind of tricky technical questions during an interview because I always became too nervous and had constant brain farting.  So I was not about to retaliate against my own workers.

When it came down to having my first interview, I was pretty well prepared.  I had always been on the other side of the table during the interviewing and I never really imagined myself handling this.  But I had high expectations and honestly never really thought about some of the complications I was soon to encounter.  My very first interviewee came into the room.  I motioned to say “Hi, My name is Sean.  What is your name?”  I spoked this sentence in about as basic as I could have imagined.  This guy looked around like, ‘What the fuck did this guy just say?’  Really, it looked like he thought I was speaking in some kind of strange Swahili tongue and I was just playing a joke on this guy.  Eventually he picked up that this was English, that I did not look like a Chinese guy, that I was speaking English, that this was an ‘English’ interview and that he clearly was not an English speaker.  I scrapped some very basic Chinese together and managed to correctly explain a few things and ask him to take the test I had carefully written for my applicants.  Eventually though, it was clear I was just wasting my time and wasting his.  I proceeded to leave the room, ask the HR director of my partnering company to talk to him in Chinese and tell him his Chinese is just not good enough.  Unfortunate, but that is just a fact of life.

So much more to come… Stay tuned…