The Silicon Review ^Asia

Every single business faces the ever-present problem of hiring and retaining the right talent. Making the right hiring decisions at the beginning can have crucial long-term implications for any company, however small or large. But in the era of the internet and social media, finding the right person for a particular role and retaining them for the long-term is a huge challenge. Tackling the problem of recruitment and job search with cutting-edge innovation is a company named AJINGA.

Founded in China by two professionals who enjoyed a long and successful career in a leading human resource consultancy firm, the idea behind the company was born out of a dire need for improving and optimizing the process of recruitment and retention of ideal candidates for appropriate job profiles.

Traditionally, corporate recruiters would post jobs to local job boards and wait for candidates to apply. Ultimately, this proved to be a costly and time consuming strategy which doesn’t allow the recruiters to engage with the best candidates. As China’s leading social media WeChat has become an central part of online life in China (WeChat accounts for 34% of all data traffic in China with one third of users spending over 4 hours every day on the platform) recruiters and employer branding professionals have turned to WeChat to develop a closer, more engaging relationship with the best candidates. AJINGA has facilitated this trend with their innovative WeChat recruitment tools, WeChat powered employee referral tools, candidate Chat-Bots and social CRM (candidate relationship management) systems. The outcome for companies has been a seamless integration of their existing global recruiting infrastructure with best-in-class local recruitment tools that meets the rapidly evolving expectations and needs of China’s sophisticated, digital-first candidates!

Another area where AJINGA drives value is helping organizations make smarter hiring decisions, faster. With a population of over 1.4 billion people, China sees over eight million students graduate each year with degrees in disciplines ranging from science and engineering to commerce, medicine, management, and liberal arts and so on. Corporate recruiters who post job postings for graduate roles and wait to hear from interested candidates would have to sift through thousands and thousands of resumes just to shortlist profiles that they think would be most suited for the role. This would usually be done by looking at the university from which the applicants graduated. But this approach is far from efficient, as human resources teams have a tough time finding an employee who would not only contribute to the company but would also be motivated to stay for a long time. AJINGA’s approach involves innovative methods to assess a candidate’s Culture Fit, Occupational Personality Fit and General Mental Ability Fit. This was done with the use of integrated predictive assessments and intelligent matching algorithms.

After aspirants take the assessment, the questions answered are used to develop a profile of sorts, based on AJINGA’s algorithms and gather information about all the relevant parameters. Additionally, AJINGA’s method also involves applicants submitting a video introduction of themselves through the WeChat application to recruiters to help them analyze their communication and presentation skills. These steps provide a great deal of additional information to the recruiters and help them narrow down their search for the desired profile.

It serves as a reliable way to gauge if the candidates would be a good fit for the organizational culture. Too high a degree of cultural incongruity results in even the best and brightest quitting in a short duration.

AJINGA was the first company in the recruitment industry to make use of such advanced technology to sift through all the applicant information and derive actionable results. The company’s methods result in an enormous amount of data being collected and ensuring its security and integrity is a challenge in itself. Cybercrime has been growing in frequency and audacity, with hackers targeting not only user data, but also computing systems that are used to manage numerous aspects of a city’s infrastructure. The company holds ISO27001 certification in data management. All of the data stored on AJINGA’s servers is encrypted and so is everything that is transferred and received. Additionally, AJINGA hires some of the most qualified cybersecurity professionals to carry out routine penetration tests of its systems and determine if there is anything lacking in its security measures.

Loss of data or a breach of systems could happen not only because of an intrusion but also because of employee negligence. AJINGA makes data privacy a foremost priority and so, conducts regular staff training. Every member of the staff is required to undergo periodic training for as long as they work at the company.

AJINGA consists of 25 employees today serving over 5000 recruiters in 215 cities throughout China. It processes candidate application every 10 seconds, 24/7, 365 days a year. Its innovation has enabled recruiters to consolidate and streamline the screening process to devote energy and resources to the final face to face rounds of interviews.

AJINGA is paving the way for revolutionizing the way people seek jobs and employers recruit job seekers in a country with a massive workforce and rapidly developing industries. It serves as a great example of an avant-garde business model being an agent for positive change.

Meet the driving force behind AJINGA’s meteoric rise, Beecher Ashley-Brown

Beecher is the Sr. Vice President and a Founding Partner of AJINGA. AJINGA is one of China’s leading recruitment technology providers, pioneering the use of WeChat recruiting, big data, candidate selection algorithms and mobile-social systems in the recruiting process.

Prior to co-founding AJINGA Beecher served as the General Manager, East China of global management consulting and outsourcing firm Hewitt Associates (Shanghai).

Beecher has deep talent development and employee engagement consulting experience having served as the project manager for The Best Employers in China Study Hewitt’s biennial study benchmarking how organizations in China engage the intellectual and emotional commitment of employees.

Beecher is an active supporter of the HR community in China and has served in a variety of volunteer roles including Vice-Chair of the Australian Chamber HR Group and Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai’s HR Committee. In addition, Beecher is the Chairman of local education charity Shanghai Sunrise which has provided over 10,500 student scholarships since 1996.

“Building China’s Future by Matching Talent with Opportunity”