We’re not boasting folks, but we think we might have gone global.  As regular readers will know, we’ve been working hard on behalf of customers in many different climes over the past few years, and we figured it was probably about time we told you a little more about it.

Pretty soon, we’re going to tell you about some of the differences we’ve found from working in mainland Europe (specifically Italy), but for today we’re off to our home from home: Beijing.

Since entering the market in mid-2008, we’ve learned an awful lot about the specific nuances of working in the APAC marketplace.  It’s certainly a lot different to the UK market.  Here’s Tao Jiang from Idealpeople Beijing to tell you about the Black Market for Telephone Lists in China….

The black market for phone lists has been running underground for years in China, particularly since the internet became popular and people started sharing information on forums.

This has been quite common since China’s headhunting industry started in 90s,and works in a similar way to an insurance broker selling customers’ private information or a bank account executive selling customer lists for profit. In the past, there were not so many people caring about personal information being leaked – that was until they got hurt and started to be aware of the potential risk.

But what can they do? There’s no law to protect the rights of the people whose details are sold, and it’s hard to track and find who’s responsible. Even in the instances where they can, many people still can’t take the long process of a lawsuit.

This is how the forum works. It’s very simple: you can upload a name list onto a forum to earn “money” to pay for the list you want, and you can pay “money” you’ve “earned” (or you buy with real money) to download a name list. So HR and headhunters are able to exchange name lists using these forums, and search firm may also pay a high price to the founder of these forums for all these name lists.

These forums have become so popular that it’s become the most convenient way for hunters to find the best candidates in China.

One of the factors that influenced the growth of these forums was that most companies in China (even large MNCs) were using Excel or Word to keep records of employees’ contact information.  Enterprise applications were expensive, hard to deploy and difficult to learn. I’m not sure if there were similar things happening in the EU or US. Maybe not.

These days, most companies are getting smarter on information security. They have started to use applications to store employee data. When the contact information is not easily collected, the source is limited.

As the number of updated name lists people can get easily has reduced, the way people collaborate on these forums evolved.

Over the years, forum members had already collected a lot of resources and they have lots of customers in the headhunting industry. Gradually, they became a platform. Any headhunter or company can outsource their recruiting project onto the platform, any member of this platform can pick up the vacancy and provide CVs if they have expertise in the specific industry or they already know people who’s qualified.

The forum (platform) itself takes a small amount of the trading fee if any of position is filled. This model can support a lot of recruiting firms when they are not expert in the industry or they don’t have the capacity to deliver when they have higher priority jobs to work on.

This model sounds very exciting and innovative, but these companies are still running underground. Trading personal information or CVs is still a grey area. As security increases, there’s little potential for this business model to be successful in the future. But there’s life in them yet because the legislation around personal security will be very time consuming and will spend years to be executed.

In the future, I believe people will find other ways to get in touch with the people they want. The fight over information security never ends. We can’t foresee the future of the talent search business because of the fast-moving technology. People are getting closer, and everyone can be easily exposed because we will all have identities online which can be searchable. We can see more and more companies are using Linkedin, Twitter, any social networking tools to search talents by themselves. Not only search firms, but all agencies must strive to add more value rather than being the information keeper, or else the new technology and evolving internet will eventually kick them out of the game.