University Graduates Suffer "Employment Anxiety"

By staff reporter LIU QIONG

With 6.1 million graduates around the country, job fairs are always packed.

AFTER walking out of a job fair at Peking University, Che Xinglai shook his head disappointedly and told the reporter, "Nothing gained." Che Xinglai is a physics doctoral candidate from Tsinghua University, who will graduate in July. Like most of his classmates, he began crisscrossing Beijing campus job fairs at the beginning of the 2008 autumn semester.

Che hopes to find a job as a teacher or general staff member at a Beijing university. Compared with other students, he is in a fortunate position, since he already has an offer from a university in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province. But his girlfriend works in Beijing, so he is still looking for a job in the capital. "Doctors from our school had little difficulty finding a job in a Beijing university in the past, but this year the number of universities with recruitment plans has declined, and some even have canceled their original plans." In such a gloomy job market, Che Xinglai has little choice but to keep on searching.

A Grim Market Awash with Graduates

If universities are suffering the effects of the financial crisis, enterprises are encountering an even bigger impact. Since the end of 2008, many enterprises have shrunk or cancelled their annual campus recruitment drive. Some real estate tycoons like R&F Properties, Evergrande Real Estate Group and Mayland Lynch Foundation have cancelled their campus recruitment, while of China's four leading banks (Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Construction Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China), only three of them have struck to their original plan. And stock companies have almost stopped recruiting altogether.

At the beginning of 2008, E Fund Management was still booming. The company even assigned HR specialists to America looking for overseas recruits, regardless of the high costs involved. But as business declined, campus recruitment has been slashed. Meanwhile, some other famous companies like Citic Securities and China Jianyin Investment Securities have ceased all employment projects after the financial blowout.