Thanks to the advancement of the Internet, online recruitment, with its wide spread, easy and quick operation, lower cost, and with no time or area limitation, is gaining growing popularity among all kinds of enterprises. According to some statistics, 88% of Fortune 500 enterprises have adopted online recruitment while the number of that in China is also roaring. All these have led to the mushrooming of recruitment websites. Meanwhile, there are also some incomplete statistics showing that currently in China, the number of recruitment websites that have officially registered is more than 500, of which only a small portion is soundly operating. The relatively dynamic and influential recruitment websitesin the human resources markets are undoubtedly ChinaHR, 51job. and Zhaopin Ltd. Records show that these three giants account for half of the 500,000,000 or nearly 600.000.000yuan total in China’s market every year. Interestingly, these three recruitment websites, each with its unique strategy and character, stand toe to toe with each other in terns of the services they offer and their marketing operation.

Different Paths, Same Destination

ChinaHR, 51job and Zhaopin Ltd are impediment competitors with similar marketing positioning. However, the paths through which they build up the platforms for online recruitment do not resemble each other exactly.

ChinaHR was funded in 1997, and its precursor is E-Channel Consulting Firm—a head-hunting company which was set up in 1995. Before that, it had been offering services to wholly foreign-owned enterprises, joint ventures, large and medium-sized state owned enterprises, helping them hunt for high-level talented persons. In 2000, it finished the transformation from a traditional head-hunting company to a “professional company offering all-dimensional human resources services based on a platform of network technology”.

Zhaopin Ltd shares the same evolution with 51job, both of which were funded in 1997. The forefather of Zhaopin Ltd is Alliance Head-hunting Company, which was set up in 1994. It provides professional all-in-one HR service to many large enterprises and fast-developing small or medium-sized companies.

51job, however, has a totally different history. In September of 1998, 51job set foot on HR service area by launching the recruitment information medium 51job Weekly. In January of 1999 in Shanghai, the online version51job Weekly was opened to the public on career-post.com. Later in September, the website began to develop independently and changed its name into 51 job.com, thus embarking on the online recruitment services.

It is not hard to find that whatever the paths of these three companies to development are, the fact that they are able to stand out in the current online recruitment market owes so much to their respective core advantages and effective extended services. ChinaHR and Zhaopin Ltd establish platforms to realize the extension of services with the customer resources accumulated in the previous head-hunting services. Meanwhile, 51job transforms its path from a traditional recruitment medium to an online recruitment medium. Nevertheless, all three companies have their own distinctive characteristics. ChinaHR and Zhaopin Ltd have rich operation experience in acquiring talents while 51job possesses that in recruiting media. These are sufficient evidence for the principle that only by highlighting the core competitive strength of one’ own can any individual company give full pay to its distinctive advantages in service extension.

Marketing Operation with Distinctive Strategy

These three recruitment websites do all they could to attract the attention of customers. As early as the beginning of ChinaHR’ foundation, bragging about its “large amount of available information”, it set up a free Ad Column to allow its temporary members to publish recruitment information on the board within 3 months. This practice has helped those members get currently 120.000 page views every passing day. It is known that today, ChinaHR has daily page views of more than 6.000.000, with over 200.000 vacant position offers and over 2.800.000 individual members. Furthermore, it has received more than 2.000.000 resumes and that number is going on climbing up by over 10.000 every week, together with its 200.000-plus enterprise members. In addition, ChinaHR offers latest HR ideas, vocational advancement technique and other related knowledge to enterprise HR managers and job-hunters, enabling them to know more about ChinaHR. ChinaHR, while conducting cooperation with IBM and other companies in graduates recruitment plan to consolidate its campus recruitment front, it has also launched large-scale recruitment campaigns nationwide, and planned to conduct surveys in ChinaHR “employment index”, “salary index”, “HR Club”, “Best employer” and other HR matters, thus producing an immediate reaction in the human resource area.

Compared with the stability and low profile of ChinaHR, 51job and Zhaopin Ltd seem to be more world-shaking. 51job combines websites closely with newspapers to cover a more extensive area. Its officer maintains that today most of China’s websites, including Alibaba Group, are confined to exploring their E-magazines alone, leaving the newspapers market lagging behind. However, with reference to the characteristics of the personnel market, we can find that the wisest practice is to integrate the both. Since newspapers is available every corner, 51job, if wants to compete with local personnel newspapers, has to develop its own newspapers in this field. Therefore, 51job made a right choice by cooperating with newspapers which has already enjoyed a sound reputation in the local area. Through opening a personnel section, 51job successfully reduces the marketing cost and increases the profit point by availing itself of others’ brands, platforms and customer advantages. Obviously, this kind of operation mode is quite rewarding in that 51job opens its markets perfectly in many cities of China It also launches the magazine HR Capital for its target groups in HR area and runs the magazine independently, becoming an expect in integrating HR media.

Of course, Zhaopin Ltd is nowhere behind and has also taken various measures. First, it launched an exclusive publication Zhaopin HR Observation for its club members and solicited contributions from HR experts, researchers and other professionals. Then, it followed in the step of 51job and developed its newspapers markets in 3 cities at the end of 2003. Its newspapers section has kept moving forward at an unexpected speed and covers 15 cities nowadays.

From an integrated perspective, three companies have their own features in marketing process. ChinaHR adopts the Narrowcast practice; 51job integrates the media resources in various local areas and builds up the mode of interaction by combining websites with newspapers; Zhaopin Ltd perfectly avails itself of the successful media platforms. All of them have yielded a lot. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that both mass media and narrowcast can play their roles and the key is to spread the information to the target customers in the real sense and thus to upgrade the reputation and brand influence.