SHENZHEN ranks third among cities in the country with a starting salary of 4,890 yuan (US$722), according to the 2019 Spring Festival employment report released by xiangcaozhaopin.com, an O2O (online to offline) job recruitment platform under RenruiHR Group.

The report says the peak of the job-hunting season has arrived a week early compared to last year.

According to the report, an increasing number of jobseekers prefer to work in emerging first-tier cities such as Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu and Wuhan, while the attractiveness of employment in traditional first-tier cities like Bejing, Shanghai and Guangzhou has decreased.

A different picture was also seen regarding the difficulty of finding a job in the report. Finding jobs was described as difficult but acceptable by 56.8 percent of jobseekers. Another 25.5 percent of candidates thought it was hard and took them a lot of energy to get job offers, while this figure was over 30 percent last year. Only 13.6 percent of people said that it was easy to get a job.

The changes in the job market not only show a change in enterprises’ demand for human resources but also an improvement in the economic environment, according to the Shenzhen Economic Daily.

In terms of industry, IT, telecommunications, electronics and Internet are the most popular among jobseekers, followed by the finance, banking, funds, investment, insurance, services, medicine and hotel tourism industries, which is similar to the situation last year.

Positions in the operations, sales and administrative categories are the hottest among candidates, the report says.

People born in the year of 2000 have reached 18 years old, the legal age of adulthood. The report suggests that this group is more focused on happiness and self-improvement at work compared to those born in the 1990s and 1980s.

(Wang Jingli)