In addition to the coverage of the hacking incident, there has been much talk about how business will become difficult for Google in China and how China might retaliate against Google. While some of this might be true, what I saw this morning in Shanghai’s subway line 2 is fairly surprising. Check this out:

Yes, a Google ad (click to enlarge), for their G.cn domain. In fact, the whole train was plastered with those ads. For those who don’t know, line 2 isn’t some rural country side subway line. It’s like the main line that connects Puxi with Lujiazui financial district and transports about a buzzillion people every day (my estimate).

Once you open G.cn, you get forwarded to Google.cn which then forwards you to their HK site. Doesn’t make much sense to me but I guess Google has it’s reasons for this. One thing is for sure though, Google hasn’t left China and it sure doesn’t look like they intend to do so.

It has been a while since I posted last time and I am really more of a blog reader than a writer. However, I recently started using Posterous and since I actually quite enjoy using it, I decided to post something here as well.

Since leaving my job at The NetCircle, I have been busy working on my new startup called DUQI.COM. Getting back into startup mode was quite a change but so far I really enjoy my 14+ hour working days. There is a lot going on here in our office and it’s amazing to see how much you can actually get done in a fairly short period of time.

One of the things that are a bit frustrating is the “speed difference” between a startup and bigger companies or government authorities. Things can take long here, really long. It is still unclear to me how opening a corporate bank account takes like 10 working days but apparently even at ICBC, China’s biggest bank, things don’t exactly move at the speed of light. On the upside, knowing that certain things take longer makes you plan ahead a bit more, which certainly is a good thing.

Anyway, we are on track to launching our first version of the site in the beginning of April and I am really really looking forward to this. Until then, here is a relatively early mockup of our home page. I’ll post more details about the actual site later.

• University != University. We often get applications from people who state to have been studying at a university. This often happens because Chinese CV’s are translated into English word by word while the Chinese work for college is the same as for university. So if you are looking for graduates, make sure the university really was one.
• English: advanced. If you are looking for people with some English skills, don’t let yourself fool with English certificates such as CET-4 (which might also be fake) or self assessments. Too often have we had applicants with “advanced” English skills and then it turned out that they don’t even understand even simple questions. Call applicants before inviting them for an interview.
• Work samples. I don’t know whether this is a special China thing but applicants often seem to overstate their role in their reference projects or simply show samples of someone else. Make sure you have some sort of check or test in place to verify the applicant’s abilities on the spot.
• Keyword stacking. Some applicants are very flexible adjusting their “proficient knowledge” by memorizing keywords depending on the job. Don’t just check whether people are familiar with common terms you maybe even included in the job advertisement. Same as above check the applicant and ask questions, which require further explanation.
• Ugly looking CV’s. We get tons of CV’s which are badly formatted, in some strange format, have typos all over and so on. 99% of these CV’s wouldn’t even make it trough the Spam filter of western companies. However, I learned that good-looking CV’s should not be the top criteria when going trough CV’s. We hired great guys who applied with a “me.txt” file but turned out to be great picks for our company.

Ok, that’s it for now. Happy recruiting!
(Image from madebytess)