Career International is one of China’s leading recruitment firms. Established in 1996 and headquartered in Beijing, it employs over 1,000 professional recruitment consultants in 40 offices, and serves clients across 18 fields and industries. In addition to its many offices across mainland China, the company also has established operations in India and Singapore.
Career International has won a number of high-profile industry awards and accolades during its two-decade history. To name just three the firm has claimed in recent years:
- 2014 RPO APAC Overall Leaders, HRO Today Baker’s Dozen
- 2014 Best HR Outsourcing Services Firm of the Year in Greater China, HRoot
- 2013 Best HR Management Provider in Greater China, China Staff
The company is also in the middle of a period of rapid expansion. In the last twelve months alone, the firm successfully matched more than 20,000 permanent and dispatched workers with appropriate vacancies, including 16,000 senior management, professional and technical employees.
More than just a headhunting and placement agency, Career International offers its clients a full range of recruitment solutions that touch on nearly every aspect of the talent management lifecycle. The firm’s business spans multiple categories: executive search, recruitment process outsourcing, flexible staffing, sales and marketing outsourcing, campus recruitment and talent acquisition consulting. The company also runs a Career Management Institute, which offers specialized training programs designed to help talent managers develop the most effective hiring strategies for their organizations.
Over the long term, Career International aspires to become the dominant recruitment services provider in the world’s most populous country. The firm’s core values include maintaining a ‘client-oriented’ posture by always striving to predict important industry and market trends before they materialize. Career International also pursues the ideal of ‘continuous improvement’ – both in terms of client service, and also internally, working to institute efficiency and productivity gains across its various business units whenever possible.
Daxtra’s Role
The massive and expanding pool of data that Career International has amassed – on potential candidates, clients and positions on offer – is both a source of competitive advantage and a challenge to manage.
On a quest to improve workflow efficiency, extract maximum value from unwieldy volumes of candidate data and ultimately protect – and improve – the company’s bottom line, Toni Liao, Career International’s Chief Information Officer, was briefed by Daxtra on the company’s suite of automated recruitment solutions and services, and felt they were a good fit.
“We’ve been on the lookout for services that could help the company improve its performance,” Liao says. “The major challenge for us is the internal implementation, and training all employees to use these new services. When we heard about Daxtra, we visited their site and learned more about their products, and thought they could meet our needs.”
Liao is a well-known figure in China’s recruitment and IT industries, and is often interviewed by local trade media for her take on the latest developments in both sectors, as well as her career trajectory as a high-profile female executive. She graduated from Shanghai Institute of Physical Education 1992 with an IT and computer science degree and joined Career International a few years later. In 2013, she was awarded the distinction of China’s ‘Most Valuable CIO’ by IT Value.
Liao now has more than 15 years of experience at Career International, and has seen the company steadily improve and refine its internal data management systems to address the rapidly changing trends reshaping the IT and recruitment industries.
Recently, for example, Liao deployed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in an effort to more effectively manage and integrate the disparate threads of data spread across Career International’s separate businesses.
One of the key benefits of Daxtra’s product suite was that it could be integrated into Career International’s existing IT systems and assets, without disrupting established workflow processes.
“It took us a few months to integrate into our own systems, because of our own internal requirements,” says Liao. “We wanted to take our time to make sure we did it correctly and effectively.”
Though Career International is a relatively recent adopter, Daxtra already plays an integral part in Liao’s cutting-edge suite of data management tools. The company has deployed Daxtra Capture and Daxtra Parser in an effort to improve candidate searches, better manage candidate data extraction, maximize internal workflow efficiencies and above all, stay ahead of the competition.
Daxtra Capture is an integrated workflow tool that provides automatic email to database candidate data entry in seconds, eliminating for Career International the time and expenses associated with routine administrative tasks. It also helps Career International with resume and CV deduplication and updates in an entirely automated fashion, by tracking new data against existing customer relationship management (CRM) resources.
Using Daxtra’s advanced parsing technology, Career International is able to quickly and accurately turn raw CV and vacancy data into a structured XML format that fits seamlessly into existing databases – saving the firm crucial time, and ultimately, helping its bottom line.
At the same time, Career International is also benefitting from Daxtra’s unique Chinese language capabilities. These capabilities give companies like Career International the best of both worlds: resume management solutions built with cutting edge international standards that also have the ability to search, identify and categorize data in the language used by Career International’s mainly domestic candidate and client base.
“The Chinese language function is a challenging area,” Liao says. “The benefit of Daxtra is that it comes as part of a bigger package, which drives a broader set of efficiency gains across the organization.”
Today, Daxtra Capture and Daxtra Parser are both fully integrated into Career International’s existing IT architecture, almost as if the solutions were tailor-made for the organization. While the benefits of that integration are staring to materialize, Liao believes they have only just begun. “We need some time to see the full impact, but the internal feedback so far has been quite positive,” she says.
The Future
Although Career International is already among the top recruitment firms in China, the company is just getting started. As the world’s most populous country continues to evolve over the next decade – transforming from an export and infrastructure-led economy toward one built on services and domestic consumption – Career International is well positioned to capitalize on the transformation, by providing companies with the skilled workers that will power this shift.
Daxtra will be at Career International’s side as it travels this journey. Daxtra sees China as the future of recruitment in Asia, and is investing heavily in its local operation and support network, with its Asia offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. By combining global development capabilities and practices with solutions that are tailored for local needs, Daxtra will ensure Career International can continue to quickly extract candidate data and match it with customer needs, minimize labour-intensive administration processes, improve productivity, and control costs.
“We believe Daxtra will allow us to link all of our data together, and make sure our data is ‘active’ and organized,” Liao says. “For these reasons, I think Career International will be partnering with Daxtra for a long time to come”