Europe recruitment drives aim to attract intl, high-level talent

The Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone and Chengdu Tianfu Software Park are organizing a series of events across Europe from Sept 1 to 8, to explain the city's staff hiring policies and to recruit high-level personnel.

Campaigns have already been held in Frankfurt and Aachen in Germany, and Stockholm in Sweden.

"Germany and Sweden are at the frontier of robotics technology in Europe and have rich reserves of top professionals," said Li Yao, CEO of CAS-Borns Medical Robotics, a company in the Tianfu Software Park.

He said his company is dedicated to the research and development of medical-use robots. It has set up research centers in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, and Silicon Valley in the United States, and is preparing a new branch in Germany.

Chengdu Skymoons Digital Entertainment attracted many of its senior executives from the campaign last year.

"We take part in these campaigns to reach more local institutions, to learn from local companies and to build up a globalized talent strategy to support our international development," said Yan Lin, Skymoons' human resources supervisor.

"We want to become familiar with the European human resources market as quickly as possible, and prepare our staf and policies for establishing Skymoons subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and Ukraine," Yan said.

Juan Moreno, a 34-year-old R&D engineer for autonomous navigation systems and artificial vision at Audi, took part in the recruitment campaign. He said he had worked in China before and always wanted to return to China to work again.

He said Chengdu has more authentic Chinese characteristics compared with mega cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and there are many influential companies in the Tianfu Software Park, so he sees a bright future there.

Another job seeker, Rambabu Gupta, now an engineer for in-depth learning at Siemens, said he is interested in working in China. He said the country is growing faster than Europe and he can achieve faster development in China, too.

A delegation of company executives from the Chengdu Tianfu Software Park have visited the government of Hesse in Germany and a number of big-name institutions and firms across Europe, such as RWTH Aachen University, the Karolinska Institute, Kista Science City and Ericsson.

The Chengdu Tianfu Software Park will host similar recruitment campaigns in Silicon Valley and Toronto in Canada from Sept 20 to 27, in which nine companies will participate.

Peng Zhu, director of the human resources department in the Chengdu Tianfu Software Park, said: "The overseas recruitment campaigns are an important method to introduce high-level professionals from around the world."

The campaigns were first held last year in Silicon Valley and Seoul in South Korea. This year, the involved companies expanded from information technology and internet businesses to biomedicines and other sectors.

Peng added that the high-tech zone is planning a series of overseas innovation and entrepreneurship centers this year, which will not only recruit local personnel that are urgently needed by Chengdu companies, but will also help businesses to grow locally.

The administration of the high-tech zone unveiled top personnel recruitment policies in October 2016, deciding to set up a 5 billion yuan ($765 million) fund to bring in international talent.

It aims to attract at least 10,000 skilled professionals this year, including six business leaders.

The high-tech zone is now home to more than 1,500 companies, including 115 Fortune Global 500 enterprises. It ranked No 3 among China's 156 national high-tech zones for comprehensive capacity last year.