Like rats leaving a sinking ship, skilled and experienced employees who leave your company are often seen as less than ethical.

They’re not, but resignations hurt, and this makes it easy to be judgmental.

For a multitude of reasons there is normally a high level of attention to retention statistics among human resources professionals, but this is done at the expense of understanding why people leave. So, why do people leave?

Here are a few non-standard suggestions as to why someone might leave you soon (I know you have read all the 10-Point articles about the how to retain staff.):

- Research shows that employees with less than two years’ service are the most likely to resign. So the focus should be on why this is happening, and on attempts to retain new employees. This begins with the process of bringing them on board.

The research suggests that many staff are oversold on what they will get in a new position, in terms of career development and learning, and their morale declines much faster than long-term employees, who have internalized the reality of company promises. If they are still in the company they have come to terms with the natural failure to meet high expectations. The longer you keep people the longer they are likely to stay.

- Junior level staff leave because of junior level problems. The fact that senior management do not use  public transport should not inure them to the importance of this to low level staff, who often have to spend in excess of 2 hours per day on public transportation. Trying not to hire junior staff from the other side of your city, or financially supporting their efforts to live closer to your plant/factory, is a good idea.

- It is obviously true that job losses can make you physically ill, or at the very least negatively affect your psychological state. But just being in an environment where other people are losing their job, and where you could be next, is bad for the health. Being in bad health can affect performance and cause sudden exits. The easiest way for the employee to take off the pressure is for them to take a new job.

There is also the risk that comes from hiring someone from a company that has been close to bankruptcy for a considerable amount of time. It appears that when staff exit stressful environments, their stress level does not go down for some time afterward. Watch out for people who have been on the edge for too long. 50/50 joint ventures are an obvious risk environment here.

- People are leaving jobs now to take advantage of the low-cost-of-everything. If you have money, the right idea, and the patience to ride out the recession, then this is the ideal time to start up a new business. It’s not a big tide of people but they do join in with newly redundant professionals who have little to lose by starting their own company.

As a result of the recent economic crisis there is also likely to be a tide of skepticism among employees regarding the security that large companies actually deliver to them. Many professionals have seen good people lose their jobs because it was a necessary decision for the survival of the company. They are only too aware that it could easily have been them on the chopping board. Bad things can happen to good people. Watch out for the high potentials with a strong Guanxi network in your industry.

- For the past year or so companies have enjoyed the luxury of knowing that no one was going to resign. Advantage-To-Employer. It is still a weak job market out there but there are signs that you will have to spend time on retention issues soon.

Staff have built up a lot of workplace tension over the last year, and a great way to relieve that tension is to change jobs.  For professionals with strong skills the market has remained relatively strong, even at the worst of the slowdown, but new jobs are slowly trickling in for professionals with weak skills.

When the weaker staff finally leave, you can put on your Oh!-No!-You’re-Leaving face. Most managers have had a high level of experience faking the appearance of loss. It’s been a necessary pose for the last year. “Resigning? Sorry to see you go. No, there won’t be a counter-offer. Thank you. Bye-Bye … Phew! One step closer to break-even.”

Not all exits are equal. Losing your chief Technologist or your Asia Pacific Logistics Manager is not the same as losing your Production Intern or your Marketing Assistant. Many of the people that leave you should actually leave you. Having been denied this option for a year, it may come as a relief that it is coming back.

- There’s a zero-sum mentality in your office that many expatriate and non-Chinese are completely unaware of. This says that if someone else is doing well, I must be doing badly.

It is particularly strong among the younger generation, who feel they have the responsibility for the world on their shoulders (this is mostly true). Non-zero sum means that factions arise and conflict is higher than it should otherwise be. The more factions you have, the higher your resignation rate. Factions want to grow internally, and to have other factions decline. Sudden resignations are a natural outcomes of this infighting. Do you know who your primary factions are?

- The reason people stay is not necessarily the same as the reason they leave. People join organizations but they leave their managers. For a year some staff have had to put up with weak/overbearing/inept/conniving superiors, but now that the job market is picking up some small issue may become the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The Hay Group has found that people stay because of career potential, challenging work, opportunity to make a contribution, the chance to contribute to a team, a good manager or boss, recognition of work done well, and a sense of control over work. People leave because of a lack of challenge, limited growth opportunities, low standards/expectations, lack of appreciation, ineffective co-workers, lack of leadership, too much red-tape and non-competitive salary.

For the past year these issues have been put aside, and replaced by a desire for a secure, permanent job. Even the government became attractive as an employer. Now that the market is coming back we will all have to ensure that we satisfy the factors that encourage retention, and avoid the factors that encourage resignations.

Back to basics.

Reality has a tendency to bite back; when you least expect it, and no matter how hard you try to hide it. Maybe especially when you try to hide it.

When things do go badly wrong, what is the appropriate response? Should we all give up and go back to bed, or should we fight like tigers to overcome the challenge that faces us?

According to Evelin Linder:

“Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence”.

Strong stuff; and very relevant for human resources in the current economic crisis. China has had a full decade and a half of good economic times, and more than its fill of optimism. Recently, human resources has been fighting against a tide of delusion about the future, at the same time as they have been signing off on redundancy slips.

The peak of inflated optimism was reached last year when many people clearly suffered from Beijing Olympic Delusional Syndrome (BODS), which is characterized by an unwavering belief in the ability of the Chinese economy to avoid the global financial crisis (China decoupled). This syndrome is deeper than we might imagine because it is also supported by another belief that even if there were repercussions for the Chinese economy from this ‘foreign crisis’, the Chinese government has an infinite capacity to calmly smooth the waters. Cash will fix any issue that arises.

So China’s problem is the opposite of the US; untethered optimism. This is a great thing to have but it’s difficult to get people to fight hard to solve a problem if they believe that the problem will, or has been, solved already by someone else. The fact that many problems have always been somebody else’s responsibility makes it doubly difficult.

Dawn Breaks

At the same time as the bad news is finally getting through, there is a dawning realization in China that the cavalry is not coming to the rescue, and pessimism may become the new paradigm.

We can see from Evelin Linder’s comments above that pessimism can be a negative feedback loop that spirals downward towards a fatal ending. At best, pessimism negatively colors our perception of future events, and makes it that much more difficult to mount an effective response.

OECD Composite Leading Indicators

As both China’s imports and exports fall again in May; the World Bank ratchets things down lower; and jobs are a scarce as hen’s teeth, China’s employees and graduates are finally coming down to earth, with a bump.

Job fairs no longer provide jobs, so graduates and experienced hires have to rely on their Guanxi network; colleagues, acquaintances, friends and family, to get a job; any job. Correctly, graduates have adjusted their salary expectations downwards in the hope of increasing their chances. According to Caijing Magazine they have ‘plummeted’ to below RMB3,000, a figure that I would regard as still on the high side. I base this one the availability of skilled staff in China, and the necessity of government schemes that allow you to hire graduates for free.

There is a minimum number of hires in each scheme, and the schemes vary by locality, but local government now pay interns an average of about RMB1,000 per month on your behalf. The only requirement is that you commit to training them. You don’t need to pay anything but it would be advisable to top up the figure in order to get your pick of the skills.

There is some good news in the market but the fact that urban investment is rising, or that the stock market is rising does not affect experienced job seekers or new graduates. It won’t get them a job any time soon. If an employee’s company is in danger of imminent closure, urban investment is unlikely to keep it open, unless the company happens to be both local and in the infrastructure industry.

Negative Strength

From the research it appears as if pessimism is stronger than optimism. We are actually genetically hard-wired for pessimism because being attuned to possible dangers is far less fatal that being attuned to the possibilities of a bright tomorrow.

Dreamers die, and don’t pass on their genes. If you stop paying attention to that mastodon beside you, and drift into a pleasant reverie, you will soon become lunch. Repeat this process for hundreds of thousands of years and you get a predisposition to be sensitive to danger.

The evidence that pessimism is natural can be found in the fact that humans can detect sweet tastes at a ratio of 1 part in 200, but we can detect bitter at a rate of 1 part in 1 million. Bitter is a signal from nature that the food source is potentially poisonous. Sweet foods are a great source of calories.

We also know from game theory that people are more focused on losing than winning. People will do almost anything to avoid losing, but not so much to win. Basically people hate to lose more than they love to win.

Taking Root

Eating bitter is often the way to get through tough times, but it doesn’t mean we have to succumb to negativity when we fight back.

Pessimism could easily take root in our homes and offices, and for many it already has. It would have been better if the system had offered people an honest perspective of the challenges ahead, but there is little point in crying over spilt milk.

Management and HR need to keep the up the focus on costs and sales. They need to compensate for the fact that many people around them have little idea of what is happening on the ground, and no previous experience to tap into to deal with the current crisis. We study history to learn from our mistakes, but when you haven’t had a history of something you are effectively blind to it. China has no recent history of economic decline, and a whole generation see recessions as a part of the historical narrative.

The gap between the experience around you, and the level of adaptation needed to meet the challenge of this crisis, is so great that in the end the difference between the winners and losers will just be the level of persistence. Sheer-dogged-persistence.

The basis of Western (read Greek) civilization is that one person can make a difference. The person-as-hero is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don’t really think about it much. Multinational companies in China work largely on the basis of this model, with a few adjustments for the local norm of communitarianism.

At the same time, we know that teams, and teamwork, can achieve great things, even if we sometimes  characterize teams as being as useful as a bicycle to a fish. Teams don’t always have a good reputation, but this I think is a spillover from committees and meetings, which have a well deserved bad reputation.

For those of us with a positive view of teams, we assume that a group of people can complement each other, and build something greater. This is still an individualistic interpretation, and it misses out on a lot of the dynamics in teams.

The Value of Others

Research work done back in the 1930s indicates that it is often not just the collective wisdom of the group that produces greater results in teams, but the energizing effect that the group has on the individual, and a resulting improvement in their contributions.

Just the presence of other people makes us perform better.

The name given to this phenomenon is social facilitation. It was thought that this worked right across the board, and could be applied to any situation where people were aware that someone else was watching them.

After a few decades of work it turned out that social facilitation worked well for simple tasks, or any task where the person has achieved unconscious competence ie. they are autonomous. The two effects that were thought to explain this were the audience effect and the co-action effect (competition).

For complex tasks exactly the opposite happens. The presence of other people in these situations causes the team member to inhibit. The task is difficult and some level of public failure, or incompetence, is a strong possibility. As a result the team member can become overly concerned with the opinions of other team members, and can choke.

Distraction & Conflict

Social facilitation went out of fashion until it was replaced by Drive Theory in the 1960s. This says that people are hard to read so team members don’t generally know what other team members are going to do in response to their actions.

Therefore, when we are aware that we are being watched, we become more highly stimulated, and our ‘dominant response’ for that situation comes to the fore. This dominant response is our default response, given the skills and personal assets at our disposal. If this response is the right one and the task is easy, then the team pressure increases performance. And vice-versa.

This worked well until a new theory, call distraction-conflict theory came along. It says that we have only a certain level of attention we can give to a task, and the audience competes for that attention with our cognitive processing. If the task is easy, or we are experts in doing it, then we get a jolt from the audience, and perform better.

When the task is difficult, for us, then we are overloaded and the audience becomes a distraction, and not a motivating force.

Theory & Application

Drive and distraction-conflict theory tell us that when choosing members of project teams we should make sure that they are competent in their area of specialization. Otherwise we take the risk that the team-related stress will cause them to perform less ably than their actual skill level; maybe even fail completely.

Project teams are not the place to train people, except perhaps when the staff member is just there as an observer.

The more important the team, and the more intense the scrutiny is likely to be, the more important the team members’ skill base becomes. So strategic teams should be manned with senior level staff only.

The members of these top teams should know each other well, and trust each other implicitly. They should be able to predict the likely responses of the other team members in most situations, and should be sufficiently open to be able to call for help when they need it.

Junior staff need to be put on teams where the teams members don’t have such a huge psychological investment in the outcome; where the outcome of the project is not critical to the company. Otherwise they may suffer stress-induced failure, especially when the other members of the team are of the opposite sex.

Managing teams is not a scheduling issue, but a full-time job for someone who understands the psychology of teams and team building.

Transformation is one of those over-used words that are bandied about at conferences, or used by media to get your attention.

The recent attempt by the Financial Times to assess the ‘transformation’ of HR over the last 15 years starts off promisingly but never quite hits the mark. The title suggests something significant has happened but the sense you get is of raised expectations, and dissatisfaction with the final results.

The starting point, the FT tell us, was work done by Dave Ulrich, a professor of business at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He wrote a book called “Human Resource Champions”, which was a really big seller for a book about something so seemingly mundane as HR.

Ulrich suggested that HR be divided into three parts:

1. Shared Service Centres (SSCs) that deliver administrative HR services.

2. Centres of Expertise (COEs), which host experts in HR issues like C&B or talent pipeline development

3. Business Partners, who are there to do the strategic, holistic thinking about people issues.

Much of this change has happened but it has not produced the results that companies expected. The FT sees a huge gap in terms of the expectations that arose when these changes occurred, and the delivery of a more strategy minded HR function. (This begs the question as to why they thought the word transformation was appropriate for the article.)

Putting that aside, you can see that there are potential issues with this model. The COEs are based in headquarters, and the people are very specialized, so their understanding of line manager’s issues is not all that it should be. The model is also matrix-based so issues can fall between the cracks. There is also a supply chain issue as issues bounce around the different part of HR.

If this model is implemented badly, no one thinks holistically any more, and that is something that the FT raises. In the rush to build the new model, the easy work of building shared services and centres of experiences is pursued with vigor. But the appointment of business partners is often treated as afterthought.

The Real World

The unfortunate reality is that organizations have not always been able to find the skills they need to strategize HR.

They can train up in-house staff but more and more they have had to look outside their own organization to get the kind of people who could really drive the people side of the business. The FT reports that 25–30% of HR staff lost their jobs in the HR transformation process, with another 20% or so following them over the next few years.

This makes sense. A strategic approach to HR requires the production of business plans, with timelines, milestones, metrics, objectives, strategies and so on. This is not something that HR has been trained to do.

In the beginning, somewhere in the mid-90’s, this ‘New HR’ began to take root in China. The approach, by definition, had to be to train in-house HR but more recently companies have tended to bring in non-HR professionals to manage HR. These people are often heavy-weights from operations, and they don’t have to make the change from administration to strategy. They can learn HR issues as they go.

The same option is not open to those with a pure HR background, but the current economic crisis is challenging HR professionals like they have never been challenged before. This is testing their mettle, and creating the kind of confident, strategic-minded people that deserve a seat on the board. This is emergent leadership in action.

Never waste a crisis.

Now here’s an interesting idea. Map the personalities of people in a particular geography, such as a city or a country, and identify the key personality for each geographical region.

The maps below were done by Richard Florida, and they seem to identify the hotspots for certain personality traits. I don’t he is suggesting that everybody in Florida and Wisconsin is extroverted, but that there is a higher percentage of extroverted people in these areas, and that this feeds into the local culture.

My question would be; why is New York not one of the extrovert hotspots? Is the loud-mouthed New Yorker an urban myth? Am I just working with a stereotype?   (Having said that, I used to live there.)

A more interesting question would be: where are the extroverted hotspots be for China?  Guangzhou? Shanghai?  And what is the overall personality for the entire country?

Mapping & Charting

The methodology that produced the graphs was to use the Big 5 Factor psychological model. You can see each of the factors below.

Richard invited the readers of his book, ‘Who’s Your City?’, to take a Big 5 personality test on his website. He captured the ZIP code (postal code) of all the test takers, and used the data to create a map that shows where the peaks for each trait are to be found. This is not as valid as I would like but it’s still a good idea.

But there is more. Richard has also taken a look at the kind of work that people do in different areas, and identified the dominant jobs or industries. This would work even better in China where government intervention in industrial development is the norm. A graph for China, according to the data below, would be clearer and less subject to question.

It’s a pity that information and knowledge are not treated in China the same way as they are in the US. The future might be clearer for us.

You can see more graphs and charts on Richard Florida’s website.

Finding videos and interesting PPTs or PDFs that connect to my multifarious interests is not as easy as it might appear. But now and again I find, or am led to, something that ties everything together. Absolutely everything.

A bored Chinese shopkeeper studies Irish and moves to Ireland to speak to us in our ‘native’ language!??? I have to see this …

My Name Is Yu Ming

Tip ‘O the proverbial Hat to the Hao Hao Report

There was a time in China when Compensation and Benefits (C&B) was an obvious career choice for left-brained people. It fit their logical, detail-oriented, factual thinking processes.

Salaries generally trended up nicely, and much of the work was about coming to an agreement about  the amount of an increase (not so difficult). C&B specialists had the best tool to work with; cold-hard-cash, and their natural attention to detail, and skills at administration, meant that they could follow the rules of the game to its logical end. They could hold all the options in their head and outlast employees in the negotiation process.

How times change.

The recent Hay report, called ‘Reward in a Downturn’, illustrates this nicely. It points out that salary increases are at or below inflation rates, all over the world. This includes fast growing countries like China. Salary freezes are in place in 36% of companies globally, with salary cuts the order of the day in many others.

Suddenly a C&B position doesn’t look quite so attractive.

The confluence of a sequential, administrative task, with rapid change in market conditions, makes for very unhappy bedfellows. C&B people choose C&B because it was predictable, detailed, ordered, structured etc., and a good fit with the way that left-brained people approach life. Those who cannot handle the detail or the complexity move to a different part of HR.

Now, suddenly, C&B is about developing creative solutions to salary problems. Staff are looking to C&B to help them stave off redundancy, and give advice as to how to structure their package for optimal retention. The relationship is fraught with tension and emotions. I know it is a bit of a stereo-type but left-brained people don’t deal with emotions so well.

At the same time companies want to keep employees engaged. The core group of staff that deliver the product or service must be kept on board, for the time when demand picks up again. The issues that deliver on this issue are only distantly related to money so C&B cannot do a great deal about this.

C&B people are being asked to work in an environment where their main tool, money, can no longer be used as a motivator. Good staff stay in jobs because of career potential, training, challenge, contribution and so on. Having a job is the key now so these factors have become more important. Even worse, C&B’s main tool is weakening, as the scope to increase salaries is reduced.

According to Hay, this is only going to get worse. They feel there is a real possibility that:

• An increasing number of companies will impose salary freezes
• A growing number of employees will face the choice of either accepting pay cuts or facing job
losses
• Pay-out levels from bonus schemes will fall further
• Companies will increasingly look to cut their contributions to pension schemes, and the trend
away from defined benefit schemes will accelerate
• Other benefits (such as medical insurance, car schemes etc) which have been spared review so
far, will come under scrutiny.

C&B professionals will take the blame for all of these issues above because they are in the front line. At the same time they will not be able to offer much in the way of non-monetary compensation because that is still controlled by the OD and training departments.

China Results

The China results are not at all pleasing. Hay sees an increasing level of pessimism among the mainly multinationals that they survey.

Projected salary increases have been decelerating in China for the past nine month, down from 10.9%
last August to 9% in October to 8% in December to a mere 3.8% now. (Kinda matches the stock exchange and housing prices, doesn’t it?)

The good news is that companies in China are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach rather than resorting to lay-offs to cut cost. Companies still view China as a growth market and want to be in a good position when the economy rebounds.

The bad news is that part of this reluctance to fire may be attributable to barriers to layoffs which have been set by the government. Companies may want to lay off staff, but cannot overcome the barriers. Gradually, it seems, they are overcoming these barriers.

Training and development programs are down but there has been a focus on retaining high performing employees. Most companies are either maintaining or increasing investment in related programs. Companies are using the downturn as an opportunity to further enhance their performance management programs, maintain employee engagement & motivation, and focus more on retaining top talent.

For the employee, the focus in China has clearly shifted from salary to safety.

At a recent TED Conference, a lady by the name of Patti Maes introduced the idea of the Sixth Sense.

This is not just a fuzzy notion, but a wearable interface that reads gestures, project images, and pulls information from the world around us. It would eliminate the need for laptops, phones and every other device that we have in our pockets, or on our desk.

The current economic environment in China is very difficult, and as a consequence office environments are fraught with tension.

We know that the quality of the external environment can ripple through to the internal office culture: broad external tension leads to interpersonal conflicts.  But recent research indicates that you don’t need to have very high-tension conflicts in the office to have a detrimental impact on your office culture.

All you need to stifle creativity is that one person be rude to another. Simple. A third person, viewing this act, will be less creative for some time after the event. (I’d assume this applies to the person on the receiving end of the rudeness, but the research that supports the conclusion did not look at this.)

Creativity Killer

Two researchers, Christine Porath and Amir Erez, recently discovered that creativity is reduced in the presence of rude behavior.

They asked undergraduate students to take part in a study that was described to them as an investigation into personality and task performance. In actual fact they were being set up to witness students and researchers being rude to each other.

The researchers found that seeing one person being rude to another stunted the observer’s creativity, and this was measured by asking them to come up with uses for a brick, solve anagrams and so on. Those who witnessed the rudeness found fewer uses for the brick, or solved less anagrams, than those who did not view rude behavior.

In addition, viewing an act of rudeness reduced the observer’s mental performance and made them less likely to be polite. The effects were all the greater when the students were involved in a collaborative group task, as opposed to those who were involved in a competitive group task. Those in the competitive situation had something to gain when the professor was rude to another student.

The implications for HR are obvious. Tolerating rudeness in the office is counter-productive. No amount of external tension, or economic challenges, excuses rudeness to other staff. Quite the opposite in fact. Once you allow rude behavior to take root you have compromised your staff’s collective ability to solve problems. The stress from this may in itself cause even more rudeness.

Organizational culture is a collection of actions, not an airy-fairy notion that gets written on documents and is filed away until the next organizational development meeting.

It’s that time again; Hudson Report time. The news is not good; but there are no big announcements or surprises to throw us off.

The Hudson Report (hudson-report-q2-2009-asia-press-release) shows that hiring expectations for the Asia Pacific region are negative, and for every-single-country. The rate of decline is also very consistent across countries, and looks like a straight line.

Adapting to this decline is the key to survival in the future.

But this is not so easy. There is a problem getting HR staff in China to take action. The positive economic spin that we see here in the Chinese media is in direct contrast to the results of the survey, and tends to support the idea that layoffs are for a few unfortunate companies that are in serious financial distress.

If you are surrounded by this narrative it is hard to argue with it.

By contrast, in the Hudson Report we see a generalized reduction in employment in China that suggests continued declines in GDP growth, feeding further declines in employment. For example, the proportion of Hudson Report respondents in China that are expecting to cut headcount has risen from 8% to 21%. This is even worse than that reported in other Asia Pacific countries, and it’s not just an increase, it’s a leap.

The possibility that the economic decline, with an ongoing loss of jobs, will continue in China after the US has begun to grow again, is a definite maybe. Human resources professionals in China should be prepared for this.

Planning for this scenario would involve HR looking much more closely at how their company is hiring; what they are paying; and what benefits they offer. If there is continued decline in the cost of labor, advantage will go to new entrants and those companies that have the strength to stare back at employees.  (First one to blink loses.)

In an employer’s market you don’t pay huge bonuses or benefits. With exports falling significantly as a source of sales, the only replacement is the domestic China market. This market, however, is extremely price-sensitive and over-production is a huge problem. Paying over the top for staff will hurt you a lot if you have to depend on such a market.

Hidden Losses

The same logical disconnect is evident when we look at the rate at which companies are letting people go. The common belief is that China has lost 20 million staff since the beginning of this crisis; all from the countryside; and all relatively happy to go back to wherever they came from.

This survey suggests that the rate of hidden losses is high. In China, 39% of respondents say their company has reduced headcount in the last six months. Most of these companies are just flexing, as opposed to firing swathes of people to survive, but the question this raises is where these layoffs appear in official figures.

The 20 million figure that we hear all the time only includes out-of-work migrants who have lost their jobs due to closures and layoffs. The Hudson Report is focused much more on urban workers and professionals.

Evidence of a problem with layoffs is also there in the response to a question about HR-related cuts. It is true that Singapore has the highest proportion of organizations cutting staff costs in Asia, at 60%, but the media reportage in that country is very negative, and reflective of this. The narrative is that Singapore will experience serious difficulties for some time to come (6% GDP drop predicted for 2009). This is internally and externally consistent.

China comes in second on this measure. 55% of companies in China have cut HR related costs, and yet we are to believe that all is rosy the Chinese garden. No problem here; move along!

If the Hudson Report is to be believed, there is support for the idea that staff cuts in China will continue for some time. Drip, drip, drip. This makes sense when we see that the US and Europe and Japan and Australia and everyone else, has shifted from consumption to savings.

What is there for “The World’s Workshop” to produce?

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Update: JP Morgan (the-jpmorgan-view-08may092) are bullish on the world’s economy, but this will take time to translate into demand for staff. Let’s not hold any breaths.

Update #2: China’s wealthy are also having a hard time of it. Whither demand for luxury goods?

Update #3 Where will all the graduates go?

Update #3 China’s exports still falling