Finding a job through local Chinese websites

[Ludens]

In short, my questions are: has anyone successfully found a full time job in China through Chinese websites? Could you share something about the process? How did you solve your visa situation?

Longer version: While looking online for jobs in China, I've found that the usual English/expat sites don't have ads for jobs I'm looking for (translation, Chinese/English to Dutch). However, searches on Chinese websites come up with quite some results. I'd like to apply for some of these jobs, but these ads are clearly targeted at Chinese people. Most of them are coming from fairly small companies, which I guess might not have experience in hiring foreigners, but might still be interested (in my case because there aren't a lot of Chinese in China that have native level Dutch). As said above, I'd love to know if anyone has experience in looking for jobs in China this way. What attitudes did the companies have towards foreigners? Were they willing/able to get you a working visa? Anything else worth mentioning?

Some personal background: In June I'm completing my 5th and last semester studying Chinese at a university in Beijing. Next month I'm taking HSK6, expecting to pass without too much difficulty. I know my Chinese still has a long way to go, but universities don't offer higher level classes, and my scholarship is ending as well. I'm planning to stay in Beijing. My goal is to become a translator, so looking for a job in Beijing now I'd like to try to not waste time doing things not related to Chinese (teaching English, etc.). However, I have little to no professional experience in translation. I know it's relatively easy to get freelance translation work, but these won't get you a visa and I don't have time to do freelance work before finding a full time job. Any personal advice, in this thread or by PM would be welcome as well.

[roddy]

I'd say expand your search a bit - could you do translation into English? What about proofreading work, where you check a Chinese translator's English copy against the Chinese original (I did 18 months of that, and it did wonders for my Chinese reading). Chances of finding a company wanting a full-time translator into Dutch seems slim, and while some firms might like the idea of getting a foreigner onto staff, if they haven't done it before they have to do a lot of expensive admin just to get permission to employ foreigners, before they even start to think about getting you a work visa. Could take months. 

 

Maybe also app / game localisation work? Was a lot of that around a year or two back, not sure about now.

[Ludens]

Hi Roddy, thanks for your input! I could do translation into English, but as I'm not an English native speaker I haven't really considered that before. Wouldn't finding a full time job translating into English pose the same difficulties though? The usual expat sites don't seem to have a lot of full time translation jobs, even into English, so I would still be looking at ads targeted at Chinese. The same seems to be true for proofreading, I would defenitely be interested in this, especially if the translations are from Chinese, but these jobs seem hard to come by as well.

 

I get what your saying about the paperwork ands costs needed to be done before even being able to employ foreigners, I wasn't aware of this. So, basically you're saying that, no matter what kind of job you're looking for, you can forget about the local Chinese websites, at least if you need a work visa within a month or 2?

 

I've seen some localisation work coming up at the English websites, the ads somehow seemed dodgy to me, but maybe I should take a serious look. I imagine that to involve a lot of Dutch/English reading without the chance to use Chinese. Maybe that's not the case though?

 

Would be great to hear some thoughts on this from others as well! Thanks again.