Going Indigenous in China
The risk of “going indigenous” is obvious with your very first placement. It becomes less obvious the more hires you make. Chinese employees tend to know China exceptionally well — how things actually work, and how to work them. That knowledge can be a real asset. It can also drift somewhere much worse. I’ve written before that if you’re not going to focus on ethics in hiring, you’d be safer hiring someone less capable. A smart, unethical hire can cost you more than you’d ever imagine. You can always gamble on hiring and hope to get lucky — but is that really the plan you want to run on?
Plenty of recruiters send you candidates who were never real contenders to begin with. That wastes your time before the process even starts. We make sure every interview we bring you is worth your time. That said, worth-your-time and right-for-the-job aren’t the same thing — every candidate still has to earn the hire.
Westerners can lie on a resume too, but it’s usually a familiar, predictable kind of lie. Lying in China often takes a different shape, and in the worst cases, it slips past hiring managers who aren’t looking for it in the right places.
SHI Group background checks deeply everyone you think you might hire. Nothing slips past our close background check.
Going Indigenous — and Other Risky Patterns
We’ve watched this cycle play out across factories many times: a China operation “goes indigenous,” the numbers get progressively fuzzier, a Western hire comes in to clean things up, and a few years later the same operation drifts indigenous again. The cycle repeats unless someone breaks it.
We know plenty of trustworthy hires exist, both Western and Chinese, because we’ve placed them across a wide range of industries. We also know sneaky, bad hires exist, because we’ve seen more than enough of those too.
So whether you’re making your first hire or replacing someone who didn’t work out, SHI Group is here to make sure you get a good hire, every time. We dig deeper at every stage of the process to get you there.
We built this process, and kept the people who could execute it, to reach a placement success rate above 96%. Since 2018, we haven’t had to replace a single person we’ve placed for a client — 100% good placements, every year since. We tell our customers to replace any hire the moment they have doubts. Since 2018, not one of them has needed to.
Are you ready to bring in a good hire, before the risk of going indigenous catches up with you?