2019年招聘市场回顾及2020年展望China's Hiring Market: 2019 in Review, 2020 Outlook

"Wherever you are in life, I hope you find the thing that lets your life stand on its own."

Post #1

2019 has just closed, and honestly it was the hardest year for jobs I've seen so far. Macro-wise, we're squarely inside the country's structural-adjustment cycle and a cycle of "structural unemployment." I'll also say this: 2019 was genuinely the least woman-friendly year I can remember — the most absurd requirement I saw from one firm was that even a consumer-sector role had to go to a man?? I'm no feminist, but I detest gender discrimination.

OK, what follows is a year's worth of my own impressions and lessons. These are strictly personal views, not the position of any institution, and they're not aimed at any single company or person. Discussion welcome.

A Word Up Front

One: timing, terrain, and people.

Hiring and the job market run on this too. And "people" comes last — a lot of the time it's just that you got lucky, and most of us can't guarantee we'll get lucky every time. A person is a small thing; the opportunities of the era matter more. When the economy is on the upswing, everyone's busy making money and nobody much cares how tired they are — put in the overtime and you get the promotion, you make the money — and nobody's desperate about efficiency, because the efficiency of the whole environment is already high. When the economy turns down, out come the black swans and the gray rhinos: people fall ill, companies do violent layoffs, someone drops dead from overwork, signed offers get rescinded.

On the way up, 10% of people eat and drink well — they've got the talent, the ability, the horsepower. Another 30% ride the wave on luck and get a bowl of soup; 20% get something out of it through sheer effort; the bottom 50% prop up the rest. The cake is only so big, the meat only so much. On the way down, it's ability and horsepower that count — the tailwind is gone, and you can only fight your way out on your own, harder and more exhausted. The head effect keeps tightening: the 10% eating meat shrinks; the base under the 30% who used to sip soup starts to wobble; the 20% slide (they still coast on momentum, put in decent overtime, and catch whatever soup trickles down); and the bottom is always the bottom.

Here's a lot of people's real situation: they put in overtime in the boom, and they keep grinding overtime, head down, in the bust — a textbook case of the general who chases the march and won't stop for a rabbit. In the end their body gives out and they never got the soup anyway. Our own amplitude is limited; only by resonating with the era can we maximize our worth. At each stage, do the thing that maximizes efficiency — that's how you raise the overall success rate of a life.

Two: the first-person effect is everywhere.

There's a term in communications theory: the third-person effect, proposed by Professor Davison of Columbia in 1983. It means that people share a common perceptual bias when judging the influence of mass communication — they tend to assume that media messages, especially propaganda, persuasion, and negative information, won't do much to "you" or "me," but will have an incalculable effect on others. Because of this bias, the impact of mass communication doesn't happen directly among the audience it names; it happens through their contact with the "third person" nearby.

Put simply: when assessing the influence of bad news, people tend to think it hits others harder — the third-person effect. In the hiring market, you get its mirror image — the first-person effect. When assessing good news, people think it applies more to themselves. Two classic examples: an employer believes there's a candidate out there who fits its persona and its checklist exactly; and a candidate believes they can land at some specific firm — every VC wants Sequoia, every PE wants Hillhouse or Warburg. And then… the result.

Three: value beyond the job itself.

Beyond the money, good investment firms and good investors offer something extra; the same is true of good FAs and good headhunters — beyond the deal, they can and must provide a distinct value. China is still fairly uneven on this. In the U.S., even a company executive or a fund partner can go to a headhunter for career-guidance advice and be sure of getting a professional, considered response.

Three quick questions first:

1. Among the firms hiring for 2B, has anyone besides Sequoia actually landed a hire — or landed one that matched their spec?

2. Of the people who would only look at Shanghai roles, did they all end up finding a Shanghai role?

3. Have more than five FAs actually crossed over to the buy side?

Market in Review

To sum up, the 2019 market looked like this:

1. 2C consumer

2. 2B, everybody piling in

3. Finance reignited

4. No juniors

On Choices

People are pretty funny. Many of us pore over recommendations and dishes before going out to eat, carefully weighing the differences against our own tastes; most of us read a mountain of reviews before buying electronics, drilling down until we understand every spec; plenty of us consult guides before a trip, planning the transport for each city down to the detail (me, for instance). Yet when it comes to a genuinely major life decision — choosing a job, changing jobs — the most common move is to ask a few "friends" nearby what they're doing and how it feels. In reality, a lot of those friends have only ever done their own narrow slice of work; they're simply not equipped to answer the question, let alone offer any foresight or judgment. Then people check media coverage for which jobs are hottest and what they pay. A new offer comes in, and they start stacking it against their current job and the other potential openings — even though most failed life decisions come from agonizing back and forth between two options that were never good enough.

In the end, after all that effort, they make a hard decision that moves them to tears — and the outcome was often set from the start. To reassure themselves, people go back to different acquaintances again and again to confirm what they already think, while ignoring the dissenting view and magnifying every scrap of validation.

Plenty of people also ask me: buy side or sell side, primary or secondary, internet or the civil service, and so on. My view is that until you've thought it through carefully yourself, asking is neither rational nor realistic. The first premise you have to hold is this: there is no perfect job. Every job and every company you think is perfect and ideal has its own problems — so don't keep eyeing the greener grass across the fence. Second, there's no job that pays a lot, asks little, and sits close to home. Wanting to earn more necessarily means sacrificing plenty of other things. So what you need to do, in the process of choosing, is list every dimension you have to weigh and then rank them. Life, freedom, dignity, love, money — how would you order them? Or: industry, company, platform, geography — what are your preferences? Money matters a lot, but it is absolutely not the first thing to weigh.

On Market Value

• At 20 you run on specialization, at 30 on experience, at 40 on people.
• For women especially — those who are, or will be, in their childbearing years — don't lean solely on company benefits. Put more weight on building your own specialization and experience, and keep yourself in a state where you can return to work at any time.
• An industry's prospects and productivity vary by market, and the gaps can be larger than you imagine. Industry productivity is, without question, the single biggest driver of market value. If you lack technical assets and human assets, favor a high-productivity industry, or one that's "on the upswing."

On 2B

Whether or not this is the "year one" of 2B, it's at least a big year for 2B hiring — and the heat will run hot for at least the next 2–3 years. But every firm has combed the market (for half a year, often longer) and still can't find people. Why? In my view it's a severe supply-demand mismatch — so-called "structural unemployment."

First, the firm side.

① Total supply is badly short. Say the market has 1,000 investors (it's actually far more), but the big past deals mostly came out of 2C, so not many people were covering 2B; the ones warming the bench before are this year's hot commodities. My own rough estimate is 8:2, maybe 7:3 — so if total supply is a thousand, only about 20% cover 2B.

② Time in the field and background. What everyone actually wants, bluntly, are EE and CS majors. First, a lot of the people who studied that at Tsinghua or Jiao Tong never went into finance — they went to internet companies or off to a PhD. Second, many who entered the field in 2012–14 were STEM types; from 2015 on, it's mostly finance and business majors (look around at the people near you and check for yourself).

③ Gender. Many firms have a hard requirement for STEM men — chop off another slice of the pool. (Why does covering AI or SaaS require a STEM man? I've never felt STEM or men have an edge over women here.)

④ Plenty of people aren't looking: certain three USD-fund shops, for instance, won't even take a look.

⑤ The experienced. Genuinely experienced people in 2B (four-plus years) are still few.

Cut ②③④⑤, then drop the RMB funds and the ones who won't train their own — how much supply is left out of that 20-something percent?

Now the industry side. Hiring from within the industry makes sense as logic, but two things don't add up:

① Right now hardly anyone wants to jump; if anything, plenty are flowing back from the firms.

② Some people at the big U.S. tech shops want to come home, but the share is low.

③ The crux is the third point: China and the U.S. differ in national context — corporate culture, work atmosphere, and pace are entirely different. First, whether domestic firms can match the pay of the big U.S. shops is an open question; second, whether those people can adapt to the domestic pace is unproven.

Finally, currency: the USD funds won't take RMB, and right now they're not hiring FAs either.

So put those three things together: if you don't change the original spec, this can only become a long war, a war of attrition.

On Consulting

I don't deal with them much overall, but the consulting crowd left me a rather interesting impression this year.

One: to put it bluntly, consulting people are basically using outdated frameworks to process "stale information" and arrive at correct (non-wrong) platitudes. It's essentially no different from what business school teaches. There's nothing wrong with the macro framework itself, but it's not fundamentally different from stating the obvious. We all know: find the problem, then analyze it, then solve it. The key point is whether the problem you found is the real problem, whether the analysis is right, and whether the fix is optimal. On that level, because most consulting people have never done anything operational (which is exactly why many of them want to leave — it's too far from the ground), and because the information they get is often very one-sided, it's hard to get a great outcome. Add that the data now sits in the hands of the internet giants, and their days aren't easy.

Two: many consulting people chase the learning curve, but that's actually pretty illogical. Chasing the learning curve largely means giving up your pursuit of certainty and turning to embrace uncertainty — yet a lot of consulting people are people who highly pursue certainty, or who put certainty first. So it's self-contradictory.

The two points above just describe a phenomenon and a fact; they don't mean consulting is worthless — so I'll leave the rest for another time.

On FA

① The head effect will get more pronounced and keep advancing; the shakeout continues.

② Internet tailwinds are fading, the demographic dividend is quietly vanishing, quality targets are shrinking — yet the headcount in the field keeps rising rather than falling.

③ You have to see it first to have a shot at judging it. So VC is, to a large degree, a contest of relationships and information — which is why this wave of new young VCs is rapidly turning into FAs. VC is just a rung-higher sell side on the pecking order; at bottom it's internal FA, everyone's in sales, so drop the superiority complex — the FA might be out-earning you.

④ For an FA, the best fit is obviously someone who was already an FA. But a common failing of the sell side is that once you reach a certain level you want to go out on your own, provided your abilities are decent across the board — so when hiring senior, you usually can't recruit former FAs directly; more often you grow your own. In first-tier cities where survival pressure is intense, barring surprises there'll be quite a few investors (buy side) moving over to do FA in the future.

Three Criteria for Choosing a Company (for Job-Switchers) — 3 Dimensions

1. Will my market value rise?

2. Is the work environment relaxed?

3. Is there room to put my talents to use?

"A relaxed work environment" and "market value" aren't fully opposed; they're a unity of opposites. When a company is doing well, the relationship with market value looks harmonious — all prosperity and good cheer. But the moment a company hits trouble, it flips entirely, and the people without market value turn cold and ruthless.

On "Happiness" at Work

People can be roughly split into two types: target-based (to-do) versus experience-based (being). The target-based type cares about "what to do," and every action points at the goal; the experience-based type cares about "who I want to be, what state I want to be in," and personal experience is the reason behind each choice. 99% of people are the "being" type, so if you don't have something you truly, deeply want to do, don't be pessimistic. A "being" person doesn't necessarily have to find the thing their heart truly loves. But everyone surely has something they want to do, so here are a couple of small tips for finding it:

(1) Look at the thing others praise you for being good at — the thing you can't even immediately identify as a skill.

(2) Look at the thing in your ordinary work that you feel no pressure doing at all.

A Closing Word

There's a line I've always kept in mind: what is interest? Ability is interest. When you're winning the competition, interest comes naturally; when you keep falling behind, the interest naturally dies.

Wherever you are in life, I hope you find the thing — and the chips — that let your life stand on its own two feet. Not money, not power, but a desire from the very bottom of your heart: I will become that kind of person, I will live that kind of life. Only something like that can let you, after life has beaten and battered you a thousand times over, still stand up and say: I am still here.