Shake quickly to surround Ali’s base camp, not letting go of the most popular e-commerce merchant

Source: Tuworm Creative

Text | Tech Planet Chen Tong

Text | Tech Planet Chen Tong

At 10:30 in the evening, the Alibaba Xixi Park on the eve of the 618 event was still brightly lit. As soon as Shao Dong got off work, his cell phone rang. Seeing the landline number on the screen, he remembered that the headhunter had made an appointment with him at noon to introduce him to the job opportunities of Douyin e-commerce.

As early as the end of 2020, Shao Dong’s colleagues have successively joined BYTE’s new team in Hangzhou. In the operation team, he is the same as the P6 person. After the past, the general package salary increase was basically 30%-50%, which made him a little ticklish. He thought that if he was poached, maybe he could talk about a 60% increase.

However, the “big and small weeks” that ByteDance generally implements overtime make people hesitate. Among the former colleagues who have already moved to the TikTok e-commerce company, some are very happy, but some “recruitment is the peak, and there has been no growth since then.”

In the recruitment call, the headhunter introduced to Shao Dong like this: Traditional e-commerce is approaching the ceiling, and short video e-commerce still has development dividends. Moreover, the increase of e-commerce is in a wider overseas area, and the internationalization of Byte is booming, with offices all over the world, and the long-term opportunity of Byte’s e-commerce is overseas…

It’s not just bytes that come to dig people, but also Kuaishou, Pinduoduo, Didi, Meituan, and even Shopee, which has entered from Southeast Asia.

“Up to P9, down to P6″, overnight, Ali’s e-commerce business seemed to have become Amazon China in 2018, becoming a key target for companies to enter e-commerce. A battle for the defense of Alibaba’s e-commerce talents has kicked off. The most popular employer ever According to many headhunters recalling to Tech Planet, in 2016 and 2017, the entire Alibaba Group has introduced a large number of headhunting suppliers. At that time, the domestic headhunting industry had just entered a period of vigorous development, accompanied by the birth of a large number of start-up headhunting companies. These headhunting companies are looking for the most dynamic industry and the largest KA client in this industry with the greatest appetite. “Ali’s cooperation terms are more friendly to headhunters in terms of recommendation mechanism and ownership rights than byte terms,” a recruiter who has served Ali’s e-commerce and ByteDance told Tech Planet, “Ali’s business Supervisors and recruiting HR are also the ones I have seen most willing to share business logic in BAT, which can help headhunters better understand their positions.” According to the “2017 China E-commerce Development Report” issued by the Department of E-commerce and Information Technology of the Ministry of Commerce, the total number of employees in China’s e-commerce industry reached 42.5 million that year; and according to the statistics of the research group of the School of Labor and Human Resources of Renmin University of China, the Alibaba Retail Ecosystem 36.81 million jobs were created, which is equivalent to contributing nearly 87% of the total number of industries. According to Tech Planet’s understanding, Ali’s recruitment in the e-commerce sector can be divided into four battlefields according to the two dimensions of “domestic and international” and “B2B and B2C”. Each battlefield has 3 to 5 SGs (that is, Ali’s Recruitment of HR) check. Since it is necessary to connect internally with business officers, interviewers, and HRGs, as well as externally with applicants and headhunters, an SG must be equipped with 1 to 3 outsourced SAs (recruitment assistants) to complete the recruitment work. “At that time, the supplier pool of a business department was less than ten or as many as dozens. But for an SG, the true core supplier would not exceed 5 or even only 1 or 2 in the same period. “This model is similar to gold panning. After running water, see what can be deposited at the bottom of the supplier’s pool. Every year, Ali’s B2B and B2C business groups will hold headhunting supplier conferences in Hangzhou’s Binjiang and Xixi Parks to conduct supplier ratings and awards. In this digging contest, “some win by quantity, some win by attracting high-level key talents, and some are making contributions to difficult jobs such as technology, products, and international talents.” The wide-spreading net in recruitment has also made a large-scale public advertisement for the employer’s brand and image. Beginning in 2016, Alibaba has been named “Most Popular Chinese Internet Enterprise” by Universum for three consecutive years. It also ranks first in the list of China’s most attractive employers released by LinkedIn in 2019. External headhunting, internal push, and day and night farming of the internal “Taoku” team, coupled with the increase in newly acquired ecological companies (such as Ele.me), created an explosive personnel growth in Ali from 2017 to 2019, according to iiMedia data Central data show that in 2017, the number of Alibaba employees was 50,100; after just two years, the total number of Alibaba employees in 2019 has doubled to 102,000. Image source: iiMedia Consulting According to the “Talent Migration 2019” report released by Maimai, the flow trends of the three BAT companies in 2018 are: Tencent and Baidu’s talents are concentrated in Alibaba and Bytedance. At the end of 2018, the domestic talent supply has reached the point where it cannot meet the recruitment needs of Alibaba’s e-commerce. Some product and technical positions have begun to target the return of talents from large overseas factories. In 2019, Tang Xing (Hua Ming Pingchou) of the new retail technology business group-Tao Technology brought a number of his P9 to the San Francisco Bay Area to share technology on the theme of “Ali New Retail”. Tang Xing served as the director of the Shanghai R&D center at Google. He was the CTO of iQiyi before joining the Alibaba Tao department. The Alibaba e-commerce team hopes that his experience and background in Chinese and foreign companies can fill in the cultural differences in the process of “talent internationalization” . Participants in this event are mainly Bay Area Chinese engineers invited from multiple channels. “Many of you here see that the combination of domestic business and technology is very cutting-edge,” a Google engineer who was invited at the time told Tech Planet, “There was a recruitment team on site, and some mid-level and above engineers got offers at the time. , The salary given is even close to the level of the Bay Area.” Shanghai and Hangzhou, the containment of new and old rivals In Shanghai, 170 kilometers away from Hangzhou, the headquarters of Ali, a “dark horse” Pinduoduo became a spoiler on the e-commerce track. Pinduoduo’s financial report shows that as of the end of 2020, its number of active buyers reached 788 million, a year-on-year increase of 35%. During the same period, the number of active buyers of Alibaba was 779 million and that of JD was 472 million. “Our department is now hiring, and we will never look at people from Pinduoduo,” the SG of an e-commerce business team in Ali told Tech Planet. Behind this sentence is the sensitive red line of competition. “I have encountered many people who have not stayed in Pinduoduo for long and come to Alibaba e-commerce for interviews. Maybe they want to use this experience to talk about salary increases for themselves. The overall impression is not good.” Although it is a strong competitive relationship, there are still some people from the Ali e-commerce team who have gone to Pinduoduo. An employee of Pinduoduo told Tech Planet that his business team has a group of old Ali people, “The resume that makes us most interested in recruiting is also an employee from Ali e-commerce. The point of leveraging is, one is, the former In the past two years, there are few e-commerce companies to choose from in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Second, in the remuneration package of Pinduoduo, there is a lot of cash and liquid assets, which is a selling point for Ali people who hold stocks.” If it is said that in Shanghai, Alibaba e-commerce is facing the digging of companies such as Pinduoduo, Meituan, Dewu, Shopee, etc., but also because of the pain point of “changing jobs in the city”, leaving many people in the headquarters of Alibaba in Hangzhou . Then, by 2021, the natural protection of geographical location has also been broken: Kuaishou and Byte, which have aggressively entered e-commerce, have successively moved their office and workplace into Hangzhou, the headquarters of Ali. As early as January 2019, BYTE announced that it would “formally join hands with the Future Science and Technology City” in Hangzhou, and at the same time released its technical business recruitment needs in Hangzhou on its official website. On June 12 this year, the “Plot No. 77 of Yuhang Group” at the core of the Future Science and Technology City was officially listed. Industry insiders told Tech Planet that the lot is likely to be sold to Bytedance in the first ten days of next month, as the byte in Hangzhou. R & D Center. The commercial building area of ​​the plot is 119,840 square meters, which is about twice the size of ByteDance Shenzhen Building. In March 2021, Kuaishou also announced the leasing of the entire office building in Hangzhou EFC Australia Center. The EFC Financial City officially issued a statement that “Hangzhou’s “standing Silicon Valley” is surging.” According to the Kuaishou insider, the Kuaishou e-commerce team newly moved into the EFC building will quickly expand from a few hundred to thousands. E-commerce business is speeding up. Where do e-commerce talents come from? The answer is self-evident. Some Alibaba employees found that the company’s drop-off point for the employee bus between Hangzhou and Shanghai had been posted by recruiters from Douyin and Kuaishou. It was just torn off today, and it will be re-attached again tomorrow with perseverance. “Nowadays, for the big Internet companies in Hangzhou, such as Byte, Kuaishou, and even Didi, as long as the e-commerce team is located in Hangzhou, Alibaba is the number one target digging company.” A Hangzhou headhunter introduced to Tech Planet Dao, their company has hundreds of consultants in Hangzhou, but they did not choose to cooperate with Ali. “Because of the cooperation, we can’t tap Ali’s people. Ali is now our largest talent pool.” When headhunting and digging people, they will use these words to persuade candidates from Ali: Now the e-commerce track is becoming lively again, it is the “first wave of bonus period” with the golden sign of Ali. Everyone is rushing to ask for it. , But in half a year, it may not be as popular as it is now. “It can be felt to be digged. Recently, many people from the company ran out for interviews, so that I was curious when I saw the vacant positions,” an e-commerce line HR said frankly. But at the same time, some HRs from the Central Taiwan Division also said: “I don’t feel anyone is leaving for the time being. Maybe the front-end e-commerce department has been poached a bit more seriously.” According to Tech Planet, people who have left can be roughly divided into three categories: the first category is those who have returned from overseas, the e-commerce site in Ali is not smooth, and the cultural temperament cannot be integrated; the second category is those who have been in Ali for many years Old employees, they are experienced, but they have encountered bottlenecks in their career development and want to go outside to see new opportunities; the third category is the most unwilling to see Ali, which is young people. The departure of young people is what Ali cares most about. Encourage the grassroots, solve the involution, and let the talents go longer “I’m a P5, and the salary increase recently gave me a monthly salary increase of 6000.” Peng Yang is a grassroots employee of an innovation team in e-commerce technology. He graduated with a master’s degree last year and recruited to Ali. This salary increase also confirms other Ali employees’ interpretation of the recent trend: Ali should stabilize and motivate P5-P7 grassroots employees, “6000 is nothing, some P6 colleagues’ monthly salary even directly increased by 10,000, or total The package is increased by 50%.” Employees at the grassroots level are easy to belittle themselves and are the easiest to be poached. Unexpectedly, they themselves are the seedlings of the “young and high potential” that the company wants to protect the most. Some groups that are not in the outlet business often fail to recruit a new person for a month. In Peng Yang’s view, if they leave, the impact will be even greater than the impact of a P9 resignation. “When some P9s did not come here before, we can do it by ourselves, and we can iterate and deliver normally. Some high Ps come over. It harvests the fruit.” The shortage of manpower in basic-level positions has even affected the resignation of other colleagues. According to Peng Yang’s recall, a P7 colleague resigned three times last year: the first time, he had already gone to the new company, and the company sent a close colleague to persuade him to come back; the second time he resigned, the company persuaded him to wait for a while. Time; I didn’t leave until after the Spring Festival this year. In the same bonus pool, employees with P8 and above are more likely to feel that this year’s performance bonus is flat. “The weight of the bonus pool has been put on the total package of P5-P7. A lot of P6 has risen to P7.” An Alibaba e-commerce business line HR told Tech Planet, “There are many ways to meet the expectations of grassroots employees for salary returns and promotion routes, but they will not reduce the standard and difficulty of promotion. We did not have a meeting to discuss specifically. , How to specifically do such a “talent defense war”.” According to Alibaba’s internal HR, the core of the so-called “talent defense war” is not simply to prevent being poached at the moment, but to ensure that the corporate talent echelon is iterated to a healthier “dissipative structure”. Dissipation is a thermodynamic concept, which refers to a non-equilibrium open system that needs to input energy and matter from the outside, such as a flowing river, in order to maintain a new orderly structure. In the Alibaba e-commerce business team, some HRs seem to have positioned two entry points to solve existing problems. One is to solve the involution of the “shoulder”. Like Peng Yang’s team, there are five or six P9s under P10, four of which are technology. Multiple high Ps are crowded under the same business. The result may be competition with each other and excessive redundancy of product functions. Usually, P8, which has been in Ali for many years, combined with the stocks accumulated in the early days, the total annual salary is at least 2 million or more, and P9 can exceed 5 million. Even the current offers from Byte are difficult to catch. “So you see, the case of its practical competition agreement to’chase and kill’ retired old employees is rare here in Ali. Ali has such talent confidence and company mindset, and I hope that they will still be’classmates’ in the future.” Corresponding to the absence of interception when the old Ali leaves, is the increase in the scale of school recruitment. Not only has the frequency increased to every month of the year, the types of positions recruited by the school have also expanded from the only technical positions in the past to business positions such as products and markets. The second is the need to tear off the labels of “PUA Big Factory” and “996 Fubao Company” in the minds of young people. In 2019, when the recruitment boom is booming, young people who get offers from major factories will also give priority to Ali. “Now they may give priority to byte. This is what really worries Ali.” “You have to accept the fact that it is no longer the most popular employer for fresh graduates before you can actively make changes.” The HR who proposed the solution admitted frankly that there were many old Ali interviewers in the past who also acted more arrogantly in the interview. It is also often faced with the pressure of complaints from both sides: the applicant is dissatisfied with the interview and failed, and the interviewer will challenge the quality of the resume. “Now, the focus of the entire foreign recruitment is shifting from high P to P5-P7 groups, and no longer specifically looking at overseas backgrounds. There are indeed people who have long-term development in the returnees who joined Ali in the middle, but many still use Ali as a short-term springboard. People with this mentality will start to feel tormented during the landing period.” Image source: “Talent Flow and Migration 2021” by Pulse Data Research Institute (Statistical caliber: net inflow = inflow talent-outflow talent) From the data point of view, Ali still maintains a “high outflow, higher inflow” talent throughput to ensure that the net inflow of talents is still ranked in the top two in the industry. Cultivating the long-term development of talents may be the core magic weapon for Ali in this battle for e-commerce talents. Peng Yang told Tech Planet that before interviewing Ali, he had also faced the position of BYTE. “At that time, I asked the final director-level interviewer what BYTE’s training plan for me was, and he introduced me to him. He was promoted for a short period of time, but when I asked, “What’s next,” he couldn’t tell why.” In this regard, Ali’s HR also feels the same when communicating with peers. In Ali, HR needs to understand the business and be able to drive the business. “But my HR friends at BYTE told me that their daily work is more monotonously searching for treasury, interviewing, and making phone calls. The mechanized work accounts for a relatively large amount and it is impossible to see the entire closed loop. This is related to the company’s delineated responsibilities. It is not the ability of the individual to change.” Ali has allowed them to see a deeper accumulation in the accumulation of systematization and methodological distraction. Faced with the actions of several other Internet giants coming to Hangzhou, and the aggressive advancement of Byte and Kuaishou on the e-commerce track, Ali remains optimistic. For Ali, now that there are more competitors, there is more urgency to innovate internally. As an Ali’s HR said, “Think about it another way: the more players there are, the more people are willing to consider the city of Hangzhou. Being stared at and digging means that the people we have cultivated are really good.” (Note: At the request of the interviewee, Shao Dong and Peng Yang are pseudonyms in the text.) Source: Tech Planet Original title: Shake fast to encircle Ali’s base camp, not letting go of the most popular e-commerce merchant