03/03/2014
Eric Tarchoune is a French passionate entrepreneur, HR consultant, coach and headhunter. When I met him, I felt his confidence and his ambitious and I discovered a honest person who pays a lot of attention to details, laws and regulations.
He founded DRAGONFLY GROUP from the ground and created a respectable and growing headhunting company in China.
Could you tell me more about your background?
I arrived in mainland China in 1993 and I stayed in Beijing for over 3 years. Then I wanted to move to Shanghai and went back to France for a few months, found a new job and after several months’ training within the company’s premises in Northern France, at the end of 1997 I was sent to Shanghai to set up the Arc International’s Shanghai office. I worked with them for 3 years as a consultant. It was a bit like my first hands-on experience as an entrepreneur.
After that experience, I started a trading business. However, one of my major at University was Human Resources and I wanted to work in this field. A British company contacted me and offered me to work for them as a Headhunter. I stayed for 14 months because I was actually missing entrepreneurship. A friend of mine was working in a Dutch trading company and they offered me a job because they needed an interim general manager to turn around the China organisation. It was a really challenging assignment landing in a completely local organization that I had to restructure, I worked roughly 12 hours per day for 8 months but pay was rewarding. At the end of the assignment, I noticed that I did not want to work in a company as an employee anymore. I wanted to start my own business and went on to set up a consulting business focusing on competitive intelligence, knowledge management and human resources.
What is the mission of Dragonfly Group?
Today the mission has changed.
At the early stage, a friend of mine who was actually an entrepreneur in Beijing wanted to have an office in Shanghai, so we shared the risks of renting and staffing a office. After 2 years, my business was growing really well and he decided to leave the office that had become too small. I stopped the knowledge management activity because we were actually betting a lot on a project with a large multinational that never came out. We decided to focus on human resource consulting with some additional competitive intelligence activity. Dragonfly Group quickly became primarily focused on headhunting. We progressively added additional services such as coaching, training and HR audit. Then, we opened several offices in Canton, Hong-Kong, Beijing, Paris and Shenzhen. In parallel, we developed a consulting activity in France for Chinese companies too as well as global partnerships and are working with corporations from every continent.
What are the strengths of Dragonfly Group?
First of all, we know China well. We have a strong network with Chinese and foreign companies. Our team is a mix of Westerners which have a strong knowledge and appreciation of the Chinese context and our Chinese colleagues have a good understanding of Foreign companies. Each of them speaks Chinese, English and some other European languages. They all quite experienced in both operation and HR. We actually have a really interesting team with different age groups and have developed mentoring activities.
Another and quite important strength is that we have a Human Resources license, which is quite hard to get in China. Most of our competitors do not have one. It allows us to develop our activity legally. It took us a few years to receive it.
In addition to our core business, we are also doing a lot of research. We have conducted the first research ever done in China on Leadership within French companies. To sum up we are trying to innovate on many domains in order to remain competitive and attractive.
Finally we are a mix of HR consultants and headhunters that offered high value added service to our clients (large corporations and SME/entrepreneurs).
What is the future of the industry?
The HR consulting market is booming in China but the recruitment market is in a messy state. I am speaking about recruitment in the broad term. Anyone can become a recruiter. I believe that in the following years, we are going to see a consolidation because there are way too many actors who are not doing a good job at all. The recruitment market has become commoditized and the companies that are actually doing well are either the one that are famous or they have an important database or there belong to a large worldwide network. Finally there are companies like us, small but fast fishes that need to constantly innovate. It is one of the reason we developed several services. Few are doing the same things as we do. We enhance the Human Resource value chain.
Besides, there is going to be downward recruitment activity trend because the market is become more mature. Many local and foreign companies are reducing headcounts.
Eric Tarchoune is a French passionate entrepreneur, HR consultant, coach and headhunter. When I met him, I felt his confidence and his ambitious and I discovered a honest person who pays a lot of attention to details, laws and regulations.
He founded DRAGONFLY GROUP from the ground and created a respectable and growing headhunting company in China.
Could you tell me more about your background?
I arrived in mainland China in 1993 and I stayed in Beijing for over 3 years. Then I wanted to move to Shanghai and went back to France for a few months, found a new job and after several months’ training within the company’s premises in Northern France, at the end of 1997 I was sent to Shanghai to set up the Arc International’s Shanghai office. I worked with them for 3 years as a consultant. It was a bit like my first hands-on experience as an entrepreneur.
After that experience, I started a trading business. However, one of my major at University was Human Resources and I wanted to work in this field. A British company contacted me and offered me to work for them as a Headhunter. I stayed for 14 months because I was actually missing entrepreneurship. A friend of mine was working in a Dutch trading company and they offered me a job because they needed an interim general manager to turn around the China organisation. It was a really challenging assignment landing in a completely local organization that I had to restructure, I worked roughly 12 hours per day for 8 months but pay was rewarding. At the end of the assignment, I noticed that I did not want to work in a company as an employee anymore. I wanted to start my own business and went on to set up a consulting business focusing on competitive intelligence, knowledge management and human resources.
What is the mission of Dragonfly Group?
Today the mission has changed.
At the early stage, a friend of mine who was actually an entrepreneur in Beijing wanted to have an office in Shanghai, so we shared the risks of renting and staffing a office. After 2 years, my business was growing really well and he decided to leave the office that had become too small. I stopped the knowledge management activity because we were actually betting a lot on a project with a large multinational that never came out. We decided to focus on human resource consulting with some additional competitive intelligence activity. Dragonfly Group quickly became primarily focused on headhunting. We progressively added additional services such as coaching, training and HR audit. Then, we opened several offices in Canton, Hong-Kong, Beijing, Paris and Shenzhen. In parallel, we developed a consulting activity in France for Chinese companies too as well as global partnerships and are working with corporations from every continent.
What are the strengths of Dragonfly Group?
First of all, we know China well. We have a strong network with Chinese and foreign companies. Our team is a mix of Westerners which have a strong knowledge and appreciation of the Chinese context and our Chinese colleagues have a good understanding of Foreign companies. Each of them speaks Chinese, English and some other European languages. They all quite experienced in both operation and HR. We actually have a really interesting team with different age groups and have developed mentoring activities.
Another and quite important strength is that we have a Human Resources license, which is quite hard to get in China. Most of our competitors do not have one. It allows us to develop our activity legally. It took us a few years to receive it.
In addition to our core business, we are also doing a lot of research. We have conducted the first research ever done in China on Leadership within French companies. To sum up we are trying to innovate on many domains in order to remain competitive and attractive.
Finally we are a mix of HR consultants and headhunters that offered high value added service to our clients (large corporations and SME/entrepreneurs).
What is the future of the industry?
The HR consulting market is booming in China but the recruitment market is in a messy state. I am speaking about recruitment in the broad term. Anyone can become a recruiter. I believe that in the following years, we are going to see a consolidation because there are way too many actors who are not doing a good job at all. The recruitment market has become commoditized and the companies that are actually doing well are either the one that are famous or they have an important database or there belong to a large worldwide network. Finally there are companies like us, small but fast fishes that need to constantly innovate. It is one of the reason we developed several services. Few are doing the same things as we do. We enhance the Human Resource value chain.
Besides, there is going to be downward recruitment activity trend because the market is become more mature. Many local and foreign companies are reducing headcounts.