How Do Chinese Professionals Build a Network? We Interviewed 20 of Them

Do the so-called professional networking sites really help? And if you want to meet people, what actually works?

A line makes the rounds in Silicon Valley: "If an engineer updates his LinkedIn profile in the morning, he'll have five job offers by lunch."

Chinese office workers and entrepreneurs took that line to heart long ago. Like Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, they believe that meeting strangers through work can change an employee's career, and change a company too. Another story gets told just as often, this one about Netflix. In 2012 the video company picked out 170 star employees; only 9 of them had no LinkedIn account, and the CEO pushed each of those 9 to sign up, because he wanted his people to use LinkedIn to "find the nodes in the company's network."

On LinkedIn you can filter for the people you want by school, company or professional background, and even message a company you have your eye on, building your network as you go. In the United States the model is open, level and effective. People keep poking at the question: which parts of it can be copied in China and still succeed?

The wish to build something like it in China has been strong for years. Tianji, Dajie, Ushi and Wealink arrived one after another; some you may never have heard of, and some folded before you did. Tianji merged with Viadeo in 2009, hoping to borrow users from that global professional network for non-English-speaking countries, and shut down at the end of last year. Dajie worked with Sina Weibo on features called micro-recruiting and micro-networking, and made little impression.

On Zhihu, a Q&A site that also serves for meeting strangers through work, someone asks every so often whether homegrown professional networks still have a chance. A Zhihu user named Xia Zhenqiang summed it up: "Most of China's professional networking sites suffer from low user stickiness and an unclear way of making money."

When LinkedIn itself, much watched, finally came to China in 2014, it fell short too. Shen Boyang, president of LinkedIn China, admitted to QDaily in an interview last year that more than a year after launch the site still could not draw most Chinese-language users. He blamed the product: "you can't register with a phone number, you can't share by QR code" — it lagged on mobile.

But the trouble runs deeper than that. People still want to meet others through work; we are simply not used to the LinkedIn way. The ticket of admission it designed for meeting a stranger asks, on top of basic English, for a résumé with a detailed work history — and for a good deal of trust in strangers.

In China, could that ticket — a thorough professional database plus a flat, open platform — be replaced by something else?

To answer the question "How do Chinese professionals build a network?", we interviewed 20 people. Here are the answers worth keeping.

Wang Xin, former Vice President of Kingsoft / Founder of Mantou Business School

In China, what actually works if you want to meet strangers through work?

In China, one-to-one socializing with strangers is a false need. Chinese people do better in groups — alumni associations, hometown associations. Those of us who left Kingsoft even have a "Jiujinshan Club," which reads as "Old Kingsoft" and also spells San Francisco. At a reunion you have a pretext for saying hello: what year you joined, what year you left, who your boss was then. Mantou Business School's students are classmates in a virtual classroom too — a class, a group. For one-to-one relationships, you can't get around WeChat. "Mantou" comes from the English word mentor. We teach online, mostly courses for internet PMs (product managers), and afterwards we pull the students into WeChat groups to talk the material over. Mantou has had more than 400,000 users since it started, and more than 100 WeChat groups.

How is this kind of professional networking different from a business school in the ordinary sense?

After 10 years at Kingsoft I did an EMBA at CEIBS. A business school will try anything to put you in front of different people. In my year, the CEIBS students in Beijing and Shanghai often organized things together — sports days, all sorts of forums. That kind of mixing breaks up your own class and puts you next to people from other classes and other fields. But a business school runs 700,000 yuan, or 400,000 to 500,000 — far past most people's budget. What it teaches suits people 5 to 10 years into a career, while someone just out of school has no way to pick up either knowledge or contacts.

Yu Dongyu, Consultant at Ogilvy

Where do you meet strangers through work?

Since coming back to China I go to events run by the USC Beijing alumni association, roughly one a month: dinners, hikes, salons, startup forums. Last year I went to a film and television salon that Ji Erwei, an alumnus and a director of Ruige Communications, started and the association hosted; more than 100 people came, and I met people from every industry. The big events draw a hundred-odd people, the small gatherings 20 or 30, and now and then you run into a senior figure from BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). The association also runs events with other schools — in April we're holding a live-action Counter-Strike battle against our archrivals at UCLA.

Does it work?

It does. Alumni helping each other matters a great deal. More students have come home from abroad in the past two years, so the Beijing office put on an online job fair for them and invited 80 Chinese and foreign companies. In August there will be two in-person fairs for returnees, in Beijing and Shanghai. We have our own WeChat group too, where alumni post openings at their companies and pass each other's résumés along.

Li Changye, Pushi Yingcai Management Consulting (executive search)

Where do you meet strangers through work?

I search Zhihu by job information — company, title. If someone hasn't made that public, I search through topics, tags and replies to posts.

Does it work?

Fairly well. Zhihu is still a site focused on sharing knowledge, so some people feel an approach like this intrudes on them — it isn't a recruiting platform, after all. I don't use it much; I try it when I really can't find a person any other way. The main problem is that Zhihu profiles are incomplete — a user can fill them in or not — and what's there isn't always true or current.

Do you meet these people offline?

That depends on whether it helps both of our careers. If the opening I have interests him and he can do the job, we'll meet in person.

Cao Xiaocong, Directing Student at the Shanghai Theatre Academy

Where do you meet strangers through work?

I answer questions on Zhihu about theatre, film and acting. I've collected close to 3,000 upvotes, and one of my answers made it into Zhihu Daily; after that people added me every day, and for a while four or five a day on WeChat. Some were exam candidates, some from film and television companies, some students in related departments at other schools. I also went to an offline salon at Zhihu Salt Club, and when I got there I found that everyone already knew each other at one remove — which tells you how small the theatre world is.

Does it work?

My work includes teaching and taking scriptwriting commissions, so Zhihu has helped. Take the story of mine that ran in Zhihu Daily: I'd put it up hoping a publisher would be interested, and friends at film and television companies added me because of it. People you add on Zhihu won't necessarily bring work right away, and Zhihu is not a headhunter, but they are contacts to develop, and you meet plenty of people in your own line.

Shi Beichen, Chief Content Officer, Zhengyang New Media

Where do you meet strangers through work?

Last May I joined Zaih and started teaching "How to Build a Personal Brand Through Writing." A lot of the people I met became friends, and I still eat with many of my students; we get along and have things to talk about. Writing is a skill more than a subject, so the students come from everywhere: state firms, foreign firms, entrepreneurs, private companies, people fresh out of school. In the past 10 months I've talked with 100 people (Editor's note: that ranks 11th on Zaih in the career-development category, so it is not typical) and made 100,000 yuan in spending money. It started at 100 yuan an hour; now it's 2,000. My students have plenty to teach me — everyone is good at something. I teach them writing, they teach me their own fields; we're each other's mentors. Meeting through Zaih comes with a certain ceremony to it. A student arrives with a notebook and a pen, sends me the questions beforehand, and often goes home with several pages of notes. Very formal.

Shi Beichen's Zaih page

How is that different from meeting someone online and simply striking up a conversation?

Filtering people matters in professional socializing, and there are two ways to do it: money, and rules. Zaih set a rule. A lot of people have this trouble — a friend, or someone you barely know, wants to book you for a meal or a coffee and pick your brain all day. Some can't bring themselves to refuse, so they go and entertain them. And the person coming for advice may not have prepared; after enough of these you know he got nothing out of it. Time spent, no value. What Zaih does well is force the people around you to respect your time, at least a little. I've put a price on my hours, and I've said what sorts of questions I can answer. That rule tells you what I can do for you, and it filters people nicely.

What kind of person does this suit?

Entrepreneurs, I think. Say a field is completely new to you; Zaih settles it in one sitting and gets you acquainted with it, a bit like a 101 course. An hour can't teach you to write — you'd have to write 10 or 20 pieces yourself before that happens.

Fu Yuan, Senior Business Development Manager (company name withheld)

Where do you meet strangers through work?

I saw a platform called Wo You Fan ("I Have a Meal") on Weibo, followed it on WeChat and went to one. The first time was last April. They invite a well-known figure from some industry to host a private-kitchen dinner, capped at 6 guests, and you socialize over the food. The hosts at the dinners I've been to included a chemical engineer and an architect — the architect has a small courtyard house of his own design out by Tanzhe Temple in western Beijing. The guests come from all over: I've met people from finance and investment, and university students too. Some had just started working, others were senior executives or startup CEOs.

What does it cost to meet these people?

The dinners I've been to cost 99 yuan, or 200 to 300; the dearer ones can run to 498.

A networking dinner

Does it work?

Before this I'd watch a film or go shopping — it was hard to meet anyone new. All my friends came from work. This way I've made some new ones, and after a dinner we'll arrange to go to the vegetable market or the flower market together, or to another Wo You Fan dinner.

Hu Wenqian, HR at Uber Shanghai

Are there chances to meet strangers through work that most people never notice?

Uber holds a happy hour almost every month; we've done them in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou. When we open a new city, or when a city is short of people, we make H5 pages and posters, but Weibo and WeChat are still the two main channels. We go through the applications that come in and pick 50 to 60 people to come.

What form does the happy hour take?

Usually a small, relaxed bar. People sign in, Uber employees talk about where the company stands and what it's hiring for, and then we split everyone into groups of about 10 candidates with one or two Uber employees each. We hand out topics for open discussion and run a Q&A, and while that goes on we watch how people perform and how they deal with each other. At the end we talk one-on-one with the ones who interest us. Candidates who get past the happy hour are invited into the formal interviews.

At an Uber happy hour

Qi Tejia, Product Director at Maimai

Maimai is a Chinese professional networking and recruiting platform much like LinkedIn. What have you learned about the Chinese market?

Maimai began with anonymous workplace socializing and recruiting, but we found the recruiting side didn't hold people — how many times a year does anyone change jobs? The anonymous gossip did well (Editor's note: users can vent about their employers, ask what a company pays, and so on), though it wasn't the whole picture, since anonymity is only one part of working life. So we launched real-name posts. We came to see the value of socializing and kept raising its share of the product. Workplace socializing in China has only just begun.

What kinds of professional networking situations do you think can work?

We've built two typical ones. In the first, we group people by the industry they work in and the direction their career is headed, so each person is more likely to see the things, people and content inside their own circle. Inside one circle you can post under your real name and comment on or reply to other people's posts, which turns into friendships. That one is aimed at people. The second is industry news and whatever people are watching, where everyone discusses what's happening in their field. Set against the getting-to-know-each-other case, this one is aimed at content: people talk it over together and complain about things that make no sense.

Maimai's real-name feed

What kind of person does this suit?

One kind of user is there mainly to recruit or to find a job, with a clear goal. The other has no clear goal and needs to find the right people and the right content as he goes. The ratio is about one to five.

Chang Meng, Head of Strategy Research at Kanzhun / Boss Zhipin

What is it like meeting strangers through work on Boss Zhipin?

You don't have to sit through a long wait after sending in a résumé. On Boss you only need to see the job, and you can put yourself forward, say hello to the employer and hand over everything about you. Boss does recruiting by cutting out the middle and letting the two sides talk directly. In a way it puts the job seeker on the client's side of the table, because a great many bosses start the conversation themselves.

Where do you meet strangers through work yourself?

I'm in a dozen-odd industry WeChat groups. Most of them are TMT (technology, media, telecom) research groups and experience-swapping groups. In the TMT ones people mostly talk about trends, which way the wind is blowing, and sometimes the practical details of getting something done. Someone will barge in and ask whether anyone knows a person at a particular company, because they want to talk about working together — and in the end someone hands over a phone number.

Does it work?

It depends. I'll sit in a group for a while and judge how active it is, the caliber of the people talking and the quality of the talk. If it's fine, I stay; if not, I leave.

Liu Xin, Founder of Manxin Technology

I hear you joined a workplace group full of strangers too. What's different about it?

I paid 5,000 yuan to join the "Grow Together" Alipay group. It looks much like a WeChat group; the one difference is that every group sets a price to join and comes with an administrator. (Editor's note: groups like this usually run on two rules. First, you pay a yearly fee, which rises as the group grows. Second, you promise to share your experience with the group once within the year, whatever your industry. The ever-rising price is, in effect, a push to join as early as you can — though measured in the time it costs you, the arrangement is not unreasonable.)

Does it work?

I think so. After I joined I shared my experience, a dozen-odd people in the group added me as a friend, and I pulled them into another Alipay group of my own at a lower price, 598 yuan. I made my 5,000 back at once.

The mechanism sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme. For meeting strangers through work, where does the value of a group lie?

Meeting one right person in that group is worth far more to me than the 5,000 yuan. Someone there came to work for my company; someone else became a partner. Plenty of people ask to add me on WeChat every day, and at first I'd agree to meet them offline for a chat, but much of what they said never landed — no concrete deal came of it. When you arrange to meet someone from Grow Together, you already know what he is good at, so the conversation can turn concrete immediately: cross-promoting each other's official accounts, say, which is easy to do and can be done at once.