Xiaohongshu's next hot track: recruiting bloggers

A few months ago, Xiaohongshu was the rise of bloggers who left big companies. Now, Xiaohongshu has turned into an atypical job search platform. The rise of job search bloggers has provided recruiters and job seekers with an alternative to traditional platforms. However, there are also some problems and challenges behind this phenomenon.

Is recruiting people on Xiaohongshu the secret to traffic?

The popularity of the resigned blogger has just passed on Xiaohongshu, and a new traffic code - recruitment posts - has emerged again.

A blogger shared that a post with tags such as recruitment, job-seeking, big companies, layoffs, etc., plus a playful joke like "I heard it's easy to recruit people on Xiaohongshu", can easily receive over a thousand likes, and hundreds of replies and private messages within three days, mixed with dozens of resumes.

Recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu

Some people joked that when the "resigned bloggers" went back to work, the popularity of recruitment posts became understandable.

However, the experience of recruiting on Xiaohongshu is completely different from that on traditional recruitment platforms. Both parties of the recruitment have a sense of reserve and a different expectation.

Employers are no longer aggressive, but are more willing to try, hoping to find candidates on Xiaohongshu who are more interest-oriented, easier to get along with, and have more special job requirements. Job seekers no longer start by asking "how much is the salary?" or "can I have an interview?", but instead send emoticons to make friends first, and even if they are rejected, they will ask for job-hunting advice.

Xiaohongshu's user base and community atmosphere seem to provide a channel that is different from traditional recruitment platforms and solves the recruitment and job-seeking needs of some people, but there are many hidden concerns beneath the surface.

Since there is almost no threshold for posting job information on Xiaohongshu, there are also cases where some high-paying jobs are actually false information or even malicious fraud. Xiaohongshu also marked the recruitment post with a reminder "Be careful, please carefully identify the other party's information."

The recruitment industry has long faced problems such as demand mismatch, resource mismatch, supply and demand mismatch. These problems have given platforms with high traffic and high user activity an opportunity to get involved in the recruitment business. However, users need to keep their eyes open as to whether the recruitment posts published on these platforms are opportunities or traps.

1. Recruitment on Xiaohongshu is popular, but success depends on luck

There are many recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu, many of which have hundreds of likes and comments. The recruiters behind these posts can be roughly divided into the following three categories.

One category is corporate HR and headhunters.

"The Best Zhang Zhang" (hereinafter referred to as Zhang Zhang), a headhunter with 7 years of work experience, has recently posted recruitment posts frequently on Xiaohongshu.

"Is anyone willing to work as an HR in Vietnam? It's a serious position." After posting the recruitment post for an expatriate human resources manager in Vietnam, Zhang Zhang received nearly 100 comments. Some people could speak Vietnamese but had no HR experience, some were senior HRs but did not speak Vietnamese, and some asked if there were other job opportunities in Vietnam and what the salary and benefits were.

The same situation also occurred in the comment section of other overseas recruitment posts she posted. Previously, she had posted positions such as HRBP in Seoul, Sales Manager in the Spanish Power Industry, and Financial Manager in Türkiye.

Zhang Zhang chose to recruit on Xiaohongshu because of the platform's differentiated population and free posting. She mentioned to Dingjiao that the circle of expatriates is relatively narrow, the talent pool of traditional recruitment platforms is relatively saturated, and candidates are not updated in a timely manner, making it difficult to receive matching resumes. At the same time, it is difficult for headhunters to open paid recruitment platform accounts in different countries for a position. Xiaohongshu gathers Chinese people from various countries, and headhunters can use tags for free to find relatively accurate groups of people.

Xiaohongshu is also used by many headhunters to handle the needs of overseas companies that want to recruit domestic staff. After LinkedIn China closed its services, this part of the cross-border recruitment demand was partially taken over and absorbed by Xiaohongshu.

Another type is the boss of a startup company who personally steps in to “rescue” employees . Zhang Lei, founder of Heheqiqi Culture Communication, is one of them.

In early June this year, when he failed to recruit suitable candidates through conventional channels, Zhang Lei chose to post a recruitment post on Xiaohongshu, and within less than a month, he recruited three customer executives. The post is still receiving increasing interactions, "even the boss of another company is recruiting people in my comment section."

Recruiting people on Xiaohongshu is related to the company's attributes. Heheqiqi, who has been working in the entertainment industry for nearly 10 years, has always had long-term cooperation with major clients. Zhang Lei believes that customer execution is a job that is "not too difficult, but requires a little passion to do well", and there are relatively more young people who are looking for jobs driven by interest on Xiaohongshu.

After the recruitment post was sent out, Zhang Lei immediately received forty or fifty resumes, nearly 200 comments and countless private messages. Some of the people did not meet the requirements, and some were just trying to suppress their expectations (for example, there were masters from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and international students from prestigious overseas universities who came to apply for jobs). While explaining to them that they were "unsuitable", Zhang Lei also gave them some career planning advice, saying, "Such people will not last long if recruited, and it would be irresponsible to both parties."

Another category is company business personnel who come to Xiaohongshu to find colleagues.

On Xiaohongshu, there are many people from large companies who have made their identities clear and posted job referral opportunities with reasons such as “I want to transfer to another position to find a successor” or “My internship is about to end, is there anyone who wants to take over?”, which attracted a lot of attention and inquiries from job seekers. Job referrals once became a popular side job for people from large companies.

Xiao Qiao, a business manager of a large AI company, needed to recruit an operations talent for the team because HR was busy recently. He didn't have much time to read resumes in batches on traditional recruitment platforms, but wanted to find a colleague who was compatible and easy to get along with , so he finally decided to try his luck on Xiaohongshu.

A week after the post was published on Xiaohongshu, she received a lot of private messages and nearly a hundred comments, but the situation was completely different from what she expected. Many people with no relevant work experience also sent her interview applications. She could only keep rejecting them in the early communication stage. In the end, only three people were selected for the interview, and they were all stuck in the second interview because the boss wanted more professional and experienced people.

Since everyone spends a long time in the company every day, Xiao Qiao originally did not want to make recruitment a cold and rigid task. He hoped to find colleagues who get along better with him. However, in the end, because the position required job seekers to understand both technology and financial scenarios and had high professional requirements, he eventually turned to traditional recruitment platforms for recruitment.

In summary, Xiaohongshu can indeed help some recruiters find the candidates they want because of its diverse and young user base, accurate traffic recommendations, and friendly and active interactive atmosphere, but there is also a certain degree of randomness, and it also requires a lot of hidden costs.

2. Atypical recruitment costs more than expected

It is not difficult to imagine that the recruitment experience, process and user profile of Xiaohongshu, a platform originally used for leisure and relaxation, are completely different from those of traditional recruitment platforms.

Many recruiters feel that users who browse Xiaohongshu do not have clear job-seeking intentions. The idea is triggered by chance and they have not made corresponding preparations in advance . However, users of traditional recruitment platforms have clear goals and will actively promote the recruitment process.

Many recruiters have encountered users on Xiaohongshu who have no internship experience, no resume preparation, no job search sense, and only a desire to find a job. "He may verbally describe his career and educational background, and without a resume, he asked me to recommend a job opportunity for him, which is ridiculous," Zhang said.

In addition, traditional recruitment platforms use skills, industries, and salary levels as screening guidelines, but Xiaohongshu uses interests and circles as screening guidelines . Therefore, recruiters cannot see the background and profile of job seekers at a glance on Xiaohongshu. Whether they are suitable depends on chatting, and they need to spend more time getting to know each other.

Zhang Lei also noticed that job seekers may have the same feeling. They are not clear about the true identity of the recruiter or the specific requirements of the position. The recruiter needs to provide "scientific education" to every consultant who comes to consult, and the cost of explanation is very high. "Both sides are very vague, which increases the cost of mutual screening."

In this process, both parties will try to make the conversation seem more humane - on recruitment platforms, everyone will go straight to the point of talking about interviews and salaries, while on Xiaohongshu, everyone's expectations are relatively low, and they will greet each other and make friends first. Even if they feel that they cannot enter the interview stage, they will chat about other things and give each other some advice. "Even if the 'deal' fails, we can still be friends. Recruitment is no longer a cold one-way communication," Zhang Lei told "Dingjiao".

On Xiaohongshu, job seekers do not have background profiles, but they have lifelike account content that is not available on recruitment software. Different people have different opinions on the importance of account operation.

Some HRs prefer job seekers with rich account content , believing that such job seekers are more credible, have more skill points, and richer personalities.

Some bosses will not choose job seekers who operate social media accounts very well. Zhang Lei has seen many job seekers write the number of fans on their Xiaohongshu accounts exceeding 10,000 on their resumes, using it as a plus point. But in his opinion, the excessive operation of social media accounts actually reflects some negative signals - the allocation of energy and focus conflicts with work, and there is a need to go to work but also a way out of being a blogger.

In addition to the cost of communication and screening, many recruiters mentioned another high cost of recruiting on Xiaohongshu, which is to post JDs (job descriptions), submit resumes, and obtain contact information in accordance with the community's operating rules. The entire process is relatively long, and it is easy to be judged as a violation if you are not familiar with the rules.

When recruiting on Xiaohongshu, the types of positions suitable for recruitment are also limited.

Many recruiters told Dingjiao that there are targeted circles, general jobs with low technical barriers, and small and beautiful companies that are interest-driven and non-professional skills, which are more suitable for the portrait of young people who love life on Xiaohongshu.

Xiaoli, a senior HR working for a listed company, once found a tutor for her child on Xiaohongshu. Since it was a private matter, she could not directly use the company account for recruitment, and traditional recruitment platforms could not recruit in the name of an individual. The cycle of asking friends for introductions was very long. Xiaohongshu helped her solve this problem, and she received three or four good college student resumes in one night.

Later, she also tried to register a company account on Xiaohongshu for recruitment, but it turned out that there was no match. She explained to Dingjiao that if it is an easy position to recruit, posting information on the recruitment website can receive one or two hundred resumes a day, and there is no need to go through such a tortuous way; if it is a difficult position, there are usually reasons for it, either low salary or special requirements. In this case, they need to actively search or get recommendations from headhunters, and it is difficult to accurately match on Xiaohongshu.

It is undeniable that on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Weibo, many listed companies and consumer brands also register company accounts to post recruitment information, or hold activities such as forwarding and drawing prizes for offers, but the purpose of brand promotion of these behaviors is greater than the actual purpose of recruiting, and the account operation and maintenance personnel and job recruitment personnel do not belong to the same department.

3. There are many hidden concerns behind the “traffic password”

Why are recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu suddenly popular?

On the one hand, it is related to the fact that the Internet industry has continued to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the past two years, and large companies have frequently reported news of layoffs. On the other hand, 11.79 million college graduates in 2024 are about to enter the workplace, and they have begun to submit their resumes on various recruitment platforms.

China's online recruitment industry has been around for 27 years. Although traditional recruitment platforms such as 51job, Zhaopin, Liepin and BOSS Direct are still popular, recruitment can be done wherever there are many people . This year, people have begun to post recruitment needs on social platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

At the same time, with the previous craze of "resigned bloggers" on Xiaohongshu, topics related to the entire workplace, interviews, and recruitment have become increasingly popular on Xiaohongshu. Posts of the same type are also becoming templates that can be copied infinitely, and are used by all kinds of people with different purposes to share a share of the traffic.

Young people who had tired of posting their resumes on Maimai and BOSS Zhipin turned to Xiaohongshu and began to frequently see recruitment posts, but gradually, they found something wrong.

Alan is a migrant worker in Hangzhou. This year, she chose to quit her old job and switch to e-commerce. However, she found that in Hangzhou, the city of e-commerce, newbies like her are not popular. Most of the messages on BOSS Direct Recruitment are not read or replied to, or read but not replied to. So she thought about going to Xiaohongshu to check the situation of related industries.

Although Alan didn’t go to Xiaohongshu with the intention of looking for a job, she frequently saw job postings and also found ideal positions. After observing for a few days, she found that “there are a lot of hidden dangers in these job postings.”

Many of these companies will not specify the salary range in their posts, or even the work location, working hours, or specific position. They do not mention any important information, only saying that they are recruiting and directing users to private chat.

After submitting her resume and communicating with these recruiters, she found that many companies were recruiting on Xiaohongshu with the purpose of "recruiting with low salaries", because often after she sent her expected salary, no one responded to her.

On formal recruitment platforms, there are standard hourly wages for different positions. Even if you are submitting a resume across industries and are not familiar with the market conditions, the system will pop up the average salary range for this position for reference during the communication process.

In addition, she also observed that some recruitment posts contained fake positions. She once took an interview on Xiaohongshu and later found out that the recruiter had guided her to sign a contract with an MCN company, which contained many unequal terms.

A professional recruiter pointed out to Dingjiao that because social platforms do not conduct strict qualification screening, there is almost no threshold for posting job openings and collecting resumes. Some companies or self-employed individuals with qualification problems, operational problems, or inadequate staffing and inability to retain employees will recruit on the platform, and there are even many scams among them.

Because job seekers cannot determine the authenticity of company qualifications and recruitment information, "high-salary recruitment" posts are also mixed with some false information or even fraudulent information, which increases the trust cost of both parties. It is worth noting that now every recruitment post on Xiaohongshu has a reminder marked "Be careful, please carefully identify the other party's information." Zhang Zhang and Xiao Qiao have both been questioned in the comment area and private messages as "whether they are scammers." They had no choice but to show their work badges to prove themselves.

In order to successfully get an offer on Xiaohongshu, job seekers need to remember that no matter which platform they see the recruitment information on, the interview and onboarding process should be the same as on regular recruitment platforms. If you see attractive conditions such as high salary or flexible time, you need to spend more time to screen.

“Companies that cannot be found on regular recruitment platforms are basically not right. 90% of HR and headhunters who charge individuals are scammers . If you feel that they are a little unreliable, don't blindly put yourself in it even if you have to give up this seemingly good opportunity,” Zhang Zhang reminded.

Most people in the recruitment industry do not agree that social platforms should provide professional recruitment services. They believe that this will involve personal privacy issues. Young people call themselves momos on social platforms because they want to hide themselves and go crazy occasionally online. Once the account is linked to job hunting, "there will be a feeling of being monitored all the time."

Even professional recruiters or unemployed young people who are eager to find a job do not want to see job search information all the time. When they open the social platform and prepare to relax, they let the social interaction be social and the work be work.

Author: Su Qi

Source: WeChat public account " Dingjiao "

This article is authorized by @定焦to be published on 運動派. Any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 agreement