Reimagining Recruitment Excellence in China for Hays Through Social CRM
Hays
In this article, discover how Hays partnered with IT Consultis to transform its recruitment strategy in China by integrating Social CRM and leveraging WeChat to enhance candidate and recruiter engagement while ensuring regulatory compliance.
About the Client: Hays
Hays is a British multinational recruitment and human resources services company, headquartered in London, England, and founded in 1867. As a leading global professional recruiting group, Hays specializes in connecting qualified, professional, and skilled individuals with organizations worldwide.
In 2024, the brand placed around 57,700 candidates into permanent jobs and around 225,000 people into temporary roles. Hays has established a significant presence in the Asia-Pacific region, operating in 9 locations – China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand *.
To strengthen its digital presence in China and stay ahead of the competition, Hays collaborated with IT Consultis (ITC) as a trusted consultancy agency to deliver market-specific, data-driven recommendations aligned with China’s unique digital landscape.
*Source: Hays
Objectives
The joint transformation program was designed to future-proof Hays’ operations and deliver greater value across the recruitment lifecycle in China.
Together, we set out to:
- Align global and local operations for greater agility and internal cohesion
- Empower data-driven social recruiting and omnichannel lead management, reducing reliance on third-party job boards
- Centralize data and automate marketing to enhance lead management and campaign effectiveness
Solution – Comprehensive Digital Audit and Strategic Roadmap Development
ITC was designated as the dedicated PMO, aligning global and local teams, coordinating partner agencies, and ensuring timely execution. This structure empowered Hays’s China team to own the mission and sustain long-term innovation.
Our digital transformation program centered on:
- Comprehensive Digital Audit: Hays’ digital infrastructure and user experience in China were assessed, with candidate and lead journeys mapped to identify opportunities for scalability, compliance, and data optimization.
- Strategic Roadmap Development: Transformation milestones were defined, governance was established through regular steering committee meetings, and cross-functional agility was enabled.
Hays needed to optimize the journey for three key personas:
- Job Seekers: Individuals seeking new career opportunities, often facing challenges such as finding suitable roles, receiving few responses, and a time-consuming job search process.
- HR Personnel at Organizations: Professionals aiming to hire suitable employees and streamline recruitment, but who may lack a talent network or detailed knowledge of applicants’ backgrounds. These are Hays’ clients or leads.
- Hays Consultants: Experts focused on matching the right candidates with the right positions and organizations, while enhancing candidate engagement throughout the job search.
Developing a strategic roadmap was essential to address these pain points and deliver results for each persona. The resulting roadmap prioritizes two key initiatives:
1. Localizing Hays’ Global Ecosystem for China
Enhancing Hays’ digital presence in China — while ensuring compliance with local regulations—required a strategic localization of the brand’s global digital ecosystem. This critical initiative included:
Localizing the Global CRM Solution
The Chinese digital environment is shaped by unique requirements and regulations, such as the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL).
To align with these standards, enhance data privacy, and integrate seamlessly with local platforms, the strategy focused on adapting Hays’ global CRM solution.
This involved transitioning from the existing global system to Jing Social, a platform tailored specifically for China.
Localizing the Global Website
To serve as a key touchpoint for both job searches and lead generation, the approach emphasized:
- Developing a compliant Chinese website, ensuring full compliance with local regulations.
- Designing a flexible, API-based architecture to enable rapid integration with third-party tools and real-time data synchronization between Hays’ newly localized CRM and Chinese digital assets.
2. Empowering the WeChat and WeCom Ecosystem with Social CRM
Enhancing Hays WeChat Official Account with Social CRM
In addition to localizing their global ecosystem for China, social media and professional networks are also essential tools in China’s recruitment landscape.
WeChat, a multifunctional super-app with over 1.3 billion monthly active users, is crucial for connecting recruitment consultancies like Hays with both candidates and organizations.
Optimizing the WeChat Official Account can offer key opportunities for Hays to:
- Establish itself as a go-to recruitment platform
- Deliver tailored recruitment insights to candidates and employers
- Capture data to effectively match candidates with employers
- Streamline communication throughout the recruitment process
A core pillar of the roadmap involved implementing a Social CRM to enhance WeChat Official Account operations. This included:
- Mapping user journeys for job seekers and HR personnel, utilizing marketing automation tools like parametric QR codes, personalized welcome messages, menu structures, and auto-replies
- Developing tagging strategies for precise audience segmentation
- Implementing lead scoring to assess conversion potential
- Establishing SOPs for content management and segmentation
- Enabling data collection to enhance user profiles
- Deploying advanced analytics dashboards for real-time insights
Elevating Recruitment Support with WeCom
Beyond leveraging WeChat Official Accounts, adopting WeCom — the professional version of WeChat — was suggested.
This strategic move could empower Hays to deliver personalized services for both job seekers and organizations. Key suggestions included:
- Leveraging WeCom Moments, 1:1 chats, and group chat features to share targeted content, recruitment news, and industry trends, increasing visibility within the WeChat ecosystem.
- Connecting with the Social CRM to centralize data from both WeChat Official Accounts and WeCom, enabling the creation of more detailed user profiles for precise targeting.
These recommendations enabled Hays to modernize its digital infrastructure and strengthen private domain operations in China.
Results
This partnership delivered significant improvements for Hays across several strategic areas:
- Candidate & Leads Engagement: Increased the number of WeChat Official Account followers and improved campaign results
- 100% Data Ownership: Achieved full control over a private talent and client data pool, reducing reliance on third-party platforms
- Consultant Efficiency: Improved ability to find and engage candidates using social recruiting tools
- O2O Conversion: Simplified candidate journeys from digital engagement to in-person interviews
- Omnichannel Experience: Unified user journeys across the WeChat ecosystem and web platforms
- Data-Driven Marketing: Enabled real-time targeting and conversion optimization
Together, we built a scalable, compliant, and high-performing digital infrastructure — positioning Hays to lead in a rapidly evolving recruitment landscape and engage talent in a way that is both globally aligned and locally resonant.
