Where is the automotive talent going in 2021?
Wen | Peng Fei
Edit | 1 reminder
Editor's Note | Lately people have often said, "My lord, times have changed." In these words, there is both a slight fear of change and a nostalgia for the glory of the past. The "golden period" of China's automotive industry is really too dazzling. Many people wonder whether the successful experiences of the past can continue to be reproduced in the future; many people are worried about whether the so-called trend that is currently raging should really keep up. Dylan Thomas said, "Don't walk gently into that good night," but we're in the middle of a Good Night, and it's time to get out.
Some people jump and triple their annual salaries; some CEOs, who go off in person, spend 12 hours a day interviewing; and even some teams are hollowed out overnight... This is the current situation of the automotive industry in 2021, which is "difficult to recruit and more difficult to retain".
Talent is flowing at an unprecedented rate. "A few years ago, we were helping Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng to dig people from SAIC, Bosch and other manufacturers, but as the major Internet technology giants joined the ranks of car-making, now we have to dig people from these three reverses." Auto industry headhunter Linda (pseudonym) said with feeling.
For enterprises, if there is no decisive advantage in terms of platform, salary, options, etc., it is difficult to attract talents. "In hot positions, it has become the norm for talent to hold 3-5 offers." HR, a self-driving startup, said, "Even if a thousand resumes are collected, the number of employees through effective interviews, offers and then to the onboarding stage is less than 3%." This is most likely to be 'cut off' by the big factory. ”
A new round of talent competition, with the second wave of Internet car manufacturing intensified, the "talent pool" is also seriously insufficient water storage. From the perspective of the flow of talents, some traditional car companies have lit up the "alarm lights".
It will be difficult to find, where will the talent flow?
"Since 2017, we have been digging people from traditional car companies for new car-making forces such as Ideal and Xiaopeng." According to Linda, at that time, in the initial stage, the new forces were basically not recognized by the market, and almost a traditional car company background talent could join, but 2 years later, it was obvious that the new forces demanded for traditional car company personnel reached its peak.
"From 2020 to now, some new car-making forces have gradually possessed the ability to make their own blood, and the requirements for talents have become more and more stringent, and they have begun to card academic backgrounds, basically 985/211 master's degrees." The requirements for recruitment are more inclined to positions such as automatic driving research and development, intelligent cockpit design, software architecture engineer, and chip engineer. ”
Linda's poaching targets also focus from traditional car companies to Internet companies, such as Huawei smart car BU, Momenta, Ali Little Wild Donkey, Baidu Apollo, Meituan car, horizon and so on. "But this kind of enterprise, with good prospects and good treatment, wants to poach it is not so easy."
According to information on third-party recruitment websites, the demand for popular positions in Linda's mouth has increased by more than 1.8 times year-on-year. At present, it is not uncommon for the monthly salary of positions such as perception algorithm engineers and autonomous driving planning and control to reach 50k-80k.
Automotive-related positions on a recruitment website
For the position of chief software architect (digital cockpit operating system), Weilai offered a "monthly salary of more than 120k, 13 salaries", that is, a generous remuneration of more than 1.5 million yuan per year; Xiaopeng's remuneration for on-board system development experts has also been given to the level of "monthly salary of 80k, 16 salaries", equivalent to 1.3 million annual salaries. But HR also said bluntly, "With a million annual salary can not find people." ”
Chip engineer salaries are also rising. This also has a lot to do with the automotive industry driven by electrification and intelligence. Weilai, Zero Run, Geely and other car companies personally went down to "make cores", and more are the forward-looking deployment of high-computing chips for future autonomous driving.
According to the car market monogatari, a domestic start-up chip company in order to recruit a SoC chip design engineer, to the new master's students to open an annual salary of 450,000, but in the end can not recruit people.
Wang Ting (pseudonym) has been climbing in the chip industry for seven or eight years, including 2 or 3 successful experiences in chip design to tape-out, and she is particularly touched by this year's changes. "The original annual salary in a company was 400,000, last year when the job jump doubled to 800,000, who knows this year encountered a chip shortage, and there are many companies to dig people, one price of 1.4 million, but also get a considerable option; the other directly said that it can be negotiated, the salary is unlimited."
These treatments have reached an unprecedented level, even a little too high to be heart-wrenching. However, industry insiders said that these salaries are not inflated, the market has a lack of excellent talents in the core areas, especially many talents have equity incentives in the last company, and even signed a non-compete clause, and the company must increase a certain hidden cost in the recruitment process.
For the high-paid digging, a person in charge of a new force enterprise frankly said, "The money that should be burned still has to be burned, and it will die if it can't keep up with the times." In this year, he personally saw Xiaomi, Baidu and other Internet car-making armies, brandishing banknotes and frantically digging people in car companies. As long as it is a popular position talent, once the resume is hung on the Internet, you can receive more than 20 headhunting calls a day. There are also some start-up car companies' teams that have been poached overnight, and the auto business has fallen into a shutdown period.
Social recruitment information on Xiaomi's official website (local screenshot)
On Xiaomi's official social recruitment network, there are as many as 10 pages of recruitment information related to Xiaomi Automobile, a total of 150 positions, most of which focus on intelligent cockpit development and design, automotive supply chain procurement, etc., and each position is marked with a big "urgent" word.
Car Market Story has learned that due to the former president of Geely Research Institute Hu Zhengnan joined Xiaomi's Shunwei Capital, Xiaomi Auto has almost poached a team from Geely Automobile.
The halo is no longer there, and the talents of the joint venture car companies choose to "escape"
In the new wave of car manufacturing, some joint venture brand car companies are no longer the most desirable enterprises for automakers in the past.
"Consumers are no longer concerned about fuel consumption, engine horsepower, and transmission performance, but focus on 'whether the on-board voice interaction is smart enough, 'how often the car software version is iterated', which is exactly what traditional car companies lack." Mo Hui (pseudonym) originally worked for a top five car company in the world, but after watching the auto show for nearly two years, he chose to "escape".
"It's too difficult for a joint venture to start a new project." He recalled, "Any investment or project approval must be approved by both shareholders. Many times the interests and strategies of the two shareholders are not completely consistent, and when there is a disagreement, the Chinese and foreign shareholders have to meet, and this discussion cycle is not simply one day or two days, sometimes a discussion is one year and two years. ”
Under this mechanism, it will be found that the products developed by foreign car companies are lagging behind the needs of users. "I believe that with the current size of the group, we can last for ten years, but how will our careers continue after that?" Mo Hui said that this topic has been widely discussed by the company's young people after tea and dinner.
Ma Yi (pseudonym), who was in charge of saic-Volkswagen's ID.4 project, became the thrust of his job-hopping to new forces after communicating with the Germans about the problems that had been exposed. "We do not have any independent research and development, the core technology and the highest decision-making power are not in China, but in the global headquarters."
According to Ma Yi, since the beginning of this year, there have been intensive departures of employees in many internal departments, of which the talent loss in the research and development department is the most serious.
This is not just a matter of the two joint ventures of Mo Hui and Ma Yi. In recent years, the dividends of joint ventures are disappearing, in the face of the Internet's dimensionality reduction blow, the new forces of the pursuit and blockade, the proportion of domestic market sales declined month by month, the original can rely on a bright and beautiful paper diploma in SAIC Volkswagen such enterprises "lying flat", monthly double salary, every three to five three salaries, but now these welfare benefits are gone, "double salary cut, cut off in the middle of the year, traffic subsidies cut off", repeatedly make employees feel cold.
Zhu Mingrong, chairman of the Automotive Talent Professional Committee of the Chinese Talents Research Association, said that at the current market price of talents in first-tier cities, engineers with 3-5 years of work experience in the research and development of intelligent electrification technology can basically ensure that the annual income is more than 500,000 yuan, and if it is a management post with a project, it can get an annual salary of 1 million yuan. The 1 million yuan in traditional car companies is equivalent to the salary of the general manager of the department or above.
In addition to the advantages in salary, the new forces of car manufacturing basically have "equity incentives". Nio Auto adopts "full shareholding", and early employees who joined in 2018 can also obtain 2,000 shares of NIO shares; Xiaomi announced in October this year that it has approved the adoption of Xiaomi EV's equity incentive plan, and the plan is authorized to limit 1 billion shares, accounting for 10% of the total number of issued shares of Xiaomi EV.
Therefore, not all "car-making three fools" employees are willing to jump ship. "For people with options and equity, they can do better in the original company, there is no need to go to a new company, start from scratch." Linda said, "Since the beginning of this year, somewhat competitive traditional auto talents, especially young people, have either jumped ship or have a 'fled' heart. ”
Should car companies follow suit?
In this wave of "robbery wars", the brain drain of traditional car companies is the most severe. However, compared with joint venture brand car companies, Chinese brand car companies are more flexible and have learned the trick of equity incentives. According to statistics, the total amount of equity incentives of SAIC Motor, Geely Automobile and Great Wall Motor alone has reached about 25 billion yuan.
This is closely related to the launch of independent new energy vehicle brands by Chinese car companies in recent years, such as SAIC's Zhiji Automobile, Geely's Extreme Krypton, the Great Wall's Salon, and Chang'an's Avita, which require talents to continuously "transfuse" and "hematopoiesis".
However, unlike the full shareholding of some new power enterprises, the equity incentives of traditional car companies are basically spent on outstanding talents in the field of intelligent electric vehicles. Autonomous driving related practitioners are almost the highest paid parts within the main engine factory, such as SAIC Zero Beam, Great Wall Milli, Changan Zhiyan Center, etc., and the salary is far more than that of other employees in the same position.
"The Great Wall is still quite generous, and the salary given to me is almost 2-3 times that of the original, no less than the new forces that build cars." Shi Jiang (pseudonym), a product manager who jumped to the Great Wall for half a year, said about the car market Monogatari. But even if the wealth is deep, in his view, the Great Wall can recruit excellent intelligent networked car talents.
"Whether it is a graduate or a recruit, unless it is a very short-staffed position, most of the people who join Great Wall Motors must undergo a ten-day military training, which used to be a month." Shi Jiang talked about the institutional style of the Great Wall, bitterly saying, "This is not a matter of salary and treatment, Wei Zong (Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motors) has always managed the Great Wall in a semi-military manner, and yi yantang is famous, so that the industry has spread 'iron Great Wall, flowing water executives'." ”
Generally speaking, traditional car companies are not the first choice for Internet talents, while the culture of new car companies is younger and the organizational structure is flatter, so the probability of attracting excellent talents is much higher than that of traditional car companies.
According to Linda's observations this year, she found that job seekers prefer start-ups with Internet backgrounds, with high salaries, good treatment, fast growth rate and great development prospects, followed by the head of the new car-making force enterprises, followed by the independent new energy brands launched by traditional car companies, and finally traditional car companies.
Not only that, at this stage of the new car-making forces, for the traditional car companies want to jump out of the people, more or less a little "despise chain", especially to do the body, interior and exterior decoration, chassis, engine and other traditional mechanical fields, it is very difficult to jump ship.
In recent years, among the number of car companies recruiting, the demand for traditional mechanical majors and vehicle engineering majors has decreased sharply, mainly because these majors have great limitations.
The "Intelligent Connected Vehicle Industry Talent Demand Forecast Report" shows through the comparison of the current situation of curriculum settings in the national data platform for personal questionnaire and higher education quality monitoring, the core course settings of mechanical (except vehicle engineering) and vehicle engineering match 33% and 53% respectively, and lack of computer technology, automatic control theory, microcontroller principle, microcomputer principle, digital electronic technology, signal processing and other courses.
Similarly, at this stage, most of the R&D personnel of intelligent network connection are professional talents, and the relevant professional curriculum settings are currently insufficiently reflected in the composite aspect. Whether it is from the Internet or from the traditional automotive electronic software, there are shortcomings in capabilities.
For example, T-Box development engineers must understand both communication protocol-related knowledge and Linux system-related knowledge, and have an understanding of automation theory and vehicle control technology; vehicle networking big data engineers must understand both big data algorithm knowledge and computer programming language related knowledge, and vehicle engineering related knowledge, machine learning and artificial intelligence knowledge.
In this regard, Tesla software engineers know very well about hardware, and those who develop hardware can also program skillfully. This is also where most car companies want to learn from Tesla.
In the future, automotive products are an organic combination of the hardware body created by the physical factory and the software soul created by the digital factory. For the problem of "one will be difficult to find" for auto talents, Zhu Mingrong believes that too much use of high-paying "digging people" strategy to solve the problem of talent shortage may be "countered" by vicious competition for talents. Emerging composite talents need to be jointly cultivated from the government, industry, enterprises and universities to strengthen the integration of software and hardware talents.
This is a long-term process, but from the perspective of talent trends in 2021, it is more or less sketching such a picture: the new forces that stand firm are from being disdained by the market to being proud of the spring breeze, while the former strong are being weakened step by step, from the frontrunner to the runner.
There's so much more to see