Evergrande, the domestic real estate leading enterprise, released large-scale recruitment advertisements in hundreds of mainstream media outlets both in mainland and Hong Kong. Evergrande is recruiting 5300 group management and various professional technical talents globally. After recruiting more than 1300 university graduates from universities nationwide at the end of last year, this is another large-scale recruitment activity by Evergrande. Not only did it fire the first shot of the new year's regular social recruitment, but also debunked the previous online rumors of Evergrande "laying off employees".
The sluggish domestic real estate market has led to a large number of real estate talents leaving the industry. There were even online rumors that Evergrande would lay off 30% of its employees this year. According to these claims, Evergrande would either stop recruiting or significantly reduce its recruitment scale. However, the number of recruits for this recruitment drive not only didn't decrease, but increased instead, with plans to hire 5300 people at once, including 300 group management positions such as vice presidents of the group and chairmen of regional companies, and 5000 professional positions such as chief architects, chief engineers, and accountants. This means the employee scale will increase by 16.5% on the basis of the existing 32,000 plus employees.
In fact, on January 16th this year, Hui Ka Yan, Chairman of the Board of Directors of China Evergrande Group, publicly clarified the "layoff" issue when he attended the press conference in Hong Kong about the main operating conditions of Evergrande in 2011 and the sales target for 2012. In response to reporters' questions, Hui Ka Yan stated that during the development process of Evergrande, talent reserve targets are set through fixed staffing to reserve talents for the rapid development of the company. Previously, Evergrande set an 80% expansion index. Considering that Evergrande will transition from a period of high-speed growth to a stable growth period starting from 2012, the company decided to reduce the expansion index from 80% to 50%, which is a reduction of 30% in expansion, but the staffing still grows by 50%. It is not the rumored 30% "layoff" online. This recruitment exactly verifies that Evergrande is not in the process of laying off this year, but rather in the process of increasing employees.
Some analysts believe that this large-scale talent recruitment reflects Evergrande's strong demand for talents and its forward-looking layout to cope with future markets as a real estate leading enterprise. Evergrande takes advantage of this opportunity of other real estate enterprises losing talents to absorb more outstanding talents and strengthen talent reserves. It is understood that Evergrande has its own mature model for attracting talents every year, including social recruitment, campus recruitment, internal training, and overseas introduction. Evergrande regularly holds special recruitment fairs for society, attracting more than 200,000 mid-to-senior level talents to apply so far.