Weekend Long Read: How Huawei Picks and Develops Talent

The tech giant focuses on recruiting exceptional technical specialists and then leaves them with room to grow, company founder Ren Zhengfei says

Ren Zhengfei, founder and chief executive officer of Huawei Technologies. Photo: VCG

How did Huawei, as one of China’s most well-known companies, come up with its strategy for hiring? The company’s founder summarized it as a focus on technical specialists and providing them with a fertile environment to develop.

“Our reserves are in talent, not dollars,” Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, told employees in July.

In the speech, the full text of which was published on the company’s internal online community in September, Ren laid out Huawei’s strategy for recruiting and evaluating its staff. His words showed that the company clearly favors technical specialists over managerial generalists, and encourages a transparent and tolerant company culture in which employees can criticize products and strategies internally.

In 2022, Huawei had 200,000 employees working in 170 countries, with 55% of them in research and development (R&D), according to the company’s annual report.

Ren said that Huawei is striving to lead the world in its selected businesses, and doesn’t aim to dominate every field. However, in the fields where it wants to lead, the company continues to snatch up talent.

Over the past few years, talent acquisition has been one of Ren’s key areas of focus. At a meeting in September 2021 to lay out the company’s strategy for hiring more high-caliber individuals and foreigners, Ren said that Huawei had reached a critical point in its development. Ren saw bringing in more foreign talent as a way to forge a path through Huawei’s difficulties at the time.

Due to Washington’s sanctions that greatly restricted Huawei’s access to cutting-edge technologies from the U.S. and its allies, the company has boosted investment in its in-house R&D. According to its latest semi-annual report, the company increased its R&D spending 4.5% year-on-year in the first half of 2023 to 82.6 billion yuan ($11.3 billion).

What follows are edited excerpts of Ren’s speech that detail Huawei’s approach to building up its reserve of talent.

Employees play table tennis during their lunch break in Huawei’s Shanghai Research and Development Center in November 2019. Photo: VCG

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