Zhaopin.com China Best Employer Award 2014, renowned as the “Academy Awards” of China’s human resources sector, came to a successful conclusion in Sanya. Most notably, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) have shown a significant improvement in their branding awareness. Employers’ efforts on brand-building are worthy of attention of job seekers and the general public.
1000Color, Perficient China, Smartisan, Nanjing Xinwang Tech, Shenzhen Grandland Decoration Group, Baofeng.com, PHNIX, SanYuantc, and IPINYOU were all deemed winners of the Best SME Employer Award, among which, Baofeng.com, Smartisan, PHNIX and 1000Color have won the award for the second year in a row.
Development potential of opportunities in SMEs, which stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship, are attractive to many job seekers, particularly college graduates. Keeping an eye on an SME’s employer brand is a way to learn more about business trends, a way to know how start-ups and SMEs build their employer brands so as to attract job seekers, and a way to learn more about changes in social values.
Though there is a gap between SMEs and large well-known enterprises in terms of software and hardware, many SMEs have broken with convention and created their own unique brand culture. They provide employees with better material benefits and emotional support, while building an employer brand that can be more meaningful than a business brand. It is a given that talent is critical to the development of an SME. And building an employer brand enables SMEs to attract more talents and accelerate the growth of business as well.
Furthermore, analyses of the employer brand of SMEs can reveal trends in how people entering the job market are changing their career goals and expectations of a company’s corporate culture. In the 2014 China Best Employer Survey, Zhaopin.com compared the expectations between the general public and employees of SMEs. It showed employees of SMEs are more ambitious in career goals than the general public and less concerned with seeking a life/work balance and with job security than the overall average. On “self-realization” and “accepting competitive challenges,” the scores of employees of SMEs are 7 percent and 5 percent higher, respectively. These comparisons fully demonstrate that employees of SMEs focus more on their own self-improvement when considering their future career.
