Western job seekers look East

Increasingly, Europeans and Americans are flocking to Asia, looking for jobs to match their ambitions

Jan Mezlik, 29, moved here from the Czech Republic in late April for a job as a trainer in a physical therapy studio called Stretch. For him, the move brought a secure job and the chance to learn to become a Yoga instructor.

Charlotte Sumner, a lawyer, arrived eight months ago, thanks to a transfer within her firm. She had spent six months in London and another six in Moscow and had jumped at the chance of a stint in Asia, which she felt would lead to more opportunities than a posting elsewhere.

Before the global financial crisis, none of the three had thought seriously about moving to Asia. But growth in China, India, South Korea and many other countries in the region is outpacing that of Europe and the United States. Many local companies are enjoying rapid expansion, while international employers are shifting positions to Asia and are hiring again. So increasingly, European and American job seekers are hoping that Asia is a place where opportunities match their ambitions.

“Things are just so much more dynamic here,” Moaven, 28, said. “Back in London, there were fewer resources for PR events or advertising. Here, everyone is expanding and spending on marketing activities. That makes my job here a lot more interesting.”

In Hong Kong, the recruiting firm Ambition estimates that the number of resumes arriving from the United States and Europe has risen 20 to 30 per cent since 2008. These now make up about two-thirds of the more than 600 resumes its Hong Kong office gets every month, said Matthew Hill, Ambition’s managing director for the city.

Similarly, at eFinancialCareers, an online job site, applications for positions based in Singapore and Hong Kong have jumped nearly 50 per cent in the last year, its Asia-Pacific chief, George McFerran, said.

Landing a position in Asia, though, is not just a matter of being willing to make a new life halfway around the world. Many employers prefer candidates who have track records in the region and who bring language skills and local contacts to the job.

Mike Game, chief executive in Asia for Hudson, an international recruitment agency, said the number of westerners actually making the move was still fairly small. Many employers, he said, are more demanding than they were during the economic peak of 2007 and are “setting the bar very high in terms of what they want.”

Nevertheless, many westerners seem to be looking to make the move.
No wonder. The jobless rate in the US is 9.5 per cent, Britain’s is at nearly 8 per cent and Spain’s is 19.9 per cent. In Hong Kong, by contrast, the unemployment rate is 4.6 per cent. In Singapore — another hub of banking, legal and other white-collar positions — only 2.2 per cent of people are registered as being out of work. In Australia, the jobless rate fell to 5.1 per cent in June, the lowest level in nearly a year and a half.

Quick recovery

During the downturn, millions of people in Asia — from factory and construction workers to bankers and architects — lost their jobs as demand for the region’s exports plummeted and multinational companies cut back. But with most Asian countries free of bank failures and the crippling debt loads that governments and households in the West are trying to pay down, economies in the region have bounced back quickly. (Japan is an exception.)

“The speed of the recovery has caught people slightly by surprise,” McFerran of eFinancialCareers said. “The jobs market is starting to be candidate-driven again.”
Hudson said in late June the percentage of companies in Hong Kong that planned to hire workers soon was at the highest level since it began monitoring the data in 1998.

Two-thirds of companies queried in Hong Kong and in mainland China in May said they planned to add workers in the third quarter of this year. In Singapore, the figure was 57 per cent, the highest proportion since 2001, Hudson said.

Many companies in Hong Kong said it was hard to find qualified candidates and complained that salaries were rising, Ambition said in another report. The renewed hiring has been especially strong in the financial industry and in legal services. But there is movement pretty much across the board.

And hardly a day goes by without news of expansion in the hospitality and luxury goods sectors, where companies are seeking to tap booming demand in China for luxury goods and hotel rooms.

“You have to staff up now, ahead of the curve, to be ready for the sort of company you will be in five years’ time,” said Pradeep Pant, head of Kraft Foods in Asia-Pacific.
Lauren Kwan left San Francisco to take a position at the global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller in Hong Kong last year.

“I was seeing the hiring freezes and layoffs happening all around me, so I cast my net wider and wider to see what was out there,” she said.

“We’re seeing the beginning of a trend here,” Jeffrey A Joerres, chief executive of the employment service Manpower, said by telephone from Milwaukee. “With prospects so weak at home, people are considering different options and looking for where the action is.”

For their part, employers want people familiar with the local culture, as well as the business and regulatory environment. For many jobs — like sales and marketing, or investment banking and wealth management — they are looking for candidates who bring contacts and clients.

Local language skills are a plus — and often a must — for anything China-related. As a result, local candidates and Asians raised overseas tend to stand a better chance. Kwan at Burson-Marsteller grew up in the United States but is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese.

“Employers don’t want to have to do a lot of baby-sitting and training,” said Matthew Hoyle, who runs his own company, which specialises in hiring senior staff members for banks and hedge funds. “There are plenty of local people with good qualifications who speak Mandarin and Cantonese — you’d have to bring something pretty special to the table to top that.”